What if one of the most fundamental features of life began with a difference so small that it was almost nothing?

Your left hand and right hand are mirror images, but they cannot be perfectly superimposed. Surprisingly, many of the molecules essential to life have the same kind of handedness. And life overwhelmingly favors one form over the other.

Why?

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognizes Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for discoveries that help explain how tiny chemical imbalances can be amplified into dramatic molecular preferences.

In this episode, we explore the strange world of molecular handedness, the remarkable chemistry of autocatalysis, and the possibility that a microscopic difference could become a defining feature of life.

But the story leads to a much bigger question.

How does order emerge from randomness? Can a tiny accident shape the future of an entire system? And could the molecular foundations of life have depended on an almost imperceptible imbalance in the chemistry of the early Earth?

We do not yet know the complete story of how life's molecular handedness emerged. But these discoveries reveal a fascinating mechanism through which chemistry can turn a small difference into something enormous.

Perhaps the universe did not need to choose a side from the beginning.

Perhaps all it needed was a tiny difference—and a way to make that difference matter.

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