Two-year push seeks clues to life's origins

SIMON COLLINS meets a scientist given the freedom he needs to pursue his dream.

An Auckland scientist studying the "one-handedness" of living things believes that he may be on to a crucial clue regarding the origins of life.

Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger was granted a rare James Cook Fellowship by the Royal Society of NZ this week, giving him full pay for two years to work solely on his research.

He says the grant will free him from what he sees as growing pressure on university scientists to bring money in through commercial contracts.

"I resist any pressure from outside to commercialise my research, because I'm a purist.

"Probably most of the people in my department think I'm crazy.

"Maybe I am, but I like it."

German-born Dr Schwerdtfeger, now a New Zealand citizen who has tramped the Routeburn track three times, says the fact that almost all of us are either right-handed or left-handed is reflected in a similar lack of balance within all living things.

For example, sugar molecules exist in two forms that are mirror images of each other, called "right-handed" and "left-handed" sugar.

But our bodies contain only the right-handed variety.

Similarly, almost all the amino-acids found in our bodies are "left-handed".

These preferences are fixed in the fundamental double-helix structure of the DNA molecules from which all living organisms are built.

"Living nature shows an absolute preference for one-handed molecules," Dr Schwerdtfeger says.

"If you were to have DNA where you just mixed wildly left-handed and right-handed sugars, life would not exist, because you wouldn't have the double-helix structure.

"There could be someone sitting there with left-handed sugars and right-handed amino-acids, but he would be from another planet.

"He would not survive long on Earth because the sugars we encounter are right-handed.

"It must have been very important at an early stage of evolution that nature chose somehow that almost all amino-acids would be left-handed and almost all sugars right-handed and not the other way around."

Humans have occasionally upset this natural pattern.

The thalidomide tragedy, in which hundreds of babies were born deformed in Europe in 1960, is thought to have been due to a mixture of "left-handed" and "right-handed" versions of a key molecule in the drug given to the babies' mothers.

No one knows why nature seems to prefer one-handedness.

Dr Schwerdtfeger says it is "one of the great unsolved problems in the origins of life".

His eight-person team in Auckland University's chemistry department is the only group in the world that has developed computer programs to calculate the differences in energy between left and right-handed molecules.

The problem is that the differences are so small - measured in numbers with 17 zeroes after the decimal point - that no one has been able to prove or disprove the group's calculations by actual measurements.

Dr Schwerdtfeger will use his two-year fellowship to find other ways of measuring the differences, using two of New Zealand's most powerful supercomputers.

The university is leasing the machines at a cost of around $500,000 a year.

Despite that cost, he says his work will bring no immediate commercial payoff.

"I can't think of any use for it except advancing knowledge."

He has found it "very difficult" to work here because of "constant pressure to justify what you are doing in terms of how much money you are bringing into the system".

In his application to the Royal Society, he said finding good students to work at the pure frontiers of science was "almost impossible here in New Zealand since there is a strong shift towards more applied science at our university".

Yet, he says, almost all major breakthroughs that have eventually lifted people's living standards have come from "decades of fundamental research".

"We do not know what use may come of our research in 20 years," says Dr Schwerdtfeger.

"A colleague of mine says that when he is asked what use is his research, he responds: what use is a newborn baby?"