Harvard awards Turkish physicist for solving 175-year-old mystery

Today’s technology is paving the way for scientific research that was carried out years ago but yielded no results. These researches shed light on the future. Finally, there was an important development in the world of physics. So much so that Turkish physicist Furkan Öztürk uncovered the mystery that science has not been able to solve for 175 years and received an award.

Furkan Öztürk uncovered the mystery that science has been unable to solve for 175 years

Turkish physicist Furkan Öztürk has won the “Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber” award from Harvard University’s Physics Department, TRT Haber reported. This award is given to a small number of PhD students who conduct outstanding experimental and theoretical research.

In 1848, French chemist Louis Pasteur introduced the concept of “homochirality”, which states that molecules that are mirror images of each other, like the left and right hands, are essential for life. But the origin of these molecules remained a mystery to the scientific world for a long time.

Furkan Öztürk, 175 years after Pasteur’s observations, made a discovery that illuminated the origin of this mysterious phenomenon. In this way, it became easier to understand how and why homochiral molecules form.

Öztürk’s work was described as “groundbreaking” by Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jack Szostak and is considered by the scientific community as a discovery that will shed light on the origin of life on Earth and in space. It is also worth noting that the research has been published in the most prestigious scientific journals.

Öztürk emphasized that despite the difficulties he faced during the research process, he did not lose his motivation and that this process was a journey of learning and discovery for him. He also made an important announcement.

After receiving his PhD, Öztürk plans to open his own laboratory and continue his research on the origins of life. Öztürk, who will defend his thesis on homochirality at the end of this month, aims to receive his PhD degree from Harvard University’s Department of Physics.

Prof. Dr. Dimitar Sasselov, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University, said;

“Furkan is one of the most creative students I have seen in my 25-year career as a professor at Harvard. His creative intelligence and perseverance played a major role in the success of this work. For the first time in history, Ozturk’s work provides a complete recipe for how the basic building blocks of life are formed. These basic building blocks are, of course, amino acids and nucleotides. Thanks to the picture that emerged as a result of these discoveries and the recipe that this picture reveals, it has been shown how functional polymers such as proteins and RNA can be formed from homochiral amino acids and nucleotides. Of course, this is not a recipe limited to Earth. We can imagine that this could happen on any planet with conditions similar to those of the early Earth.”