Origin of Life

Many have claimed that quantum mechanics is playing a non-trivial, i.e. further from merely governing atomic and molecular realm, in living systems. If so, clearly quantum mechanics should have played a key role in the origin of life essentially in the transition from chemical evolution to biological (Darwinian) evolution. Long before quantum aspects of living systems came to focus, it was known that all the amino acids are right-handed and all the sugars are left-handed in living systems. Biomolecules having the same sense of chirality, i.e. optical activity, are called biohomochirality. Detailed studies on the structure and functioning of biomolecules buttressed the idea that the selection of handedness should have been done in the prebiotic stage. Perhaps it was a pre-requisite of biogenesis. So obviously, optical asymmetry seems to have a pivotal role in the origin of life and many attempts have been made to answer this intricate question but we are still far from finding a common ground. It is believed that the problem of origin of life can be perhaps reduced to the origin of biohomochirality. In order to solve the problem of biohomochirality, Vester and Ulbricht proposed a speculative hypothesis based on parity violation in weak interactions. According to them, the longitudinally polarized electrons emitted in natural beta-decay might be the source of the mentioned asymmetry. Forward scattering of an ensemble of electrons in a chiral medium is utilized as a chiral phenomenon to investigate that a chiral molecular system is in superposition of left-handed and right-handed forms, and that chirality can be treated as an emergent property.