Sister and brother scientists find a magnetic clue to how life began

On 6 July 2026 the Weizmann Institute of Science described a study, published in the journal Chem, that grew out of a conversation at a Friday-night family dinner. Professor Michal Sharon, a Weizmann expert in mass spectrometry, and her brother Professor Yossi Paltiel, a physicist and dean of science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, had always assumed they worked in unrelated fields. When Paltiel described his research on using magnets to sort molecules, the siblings realised they could tackle a question new to both of them: how life got started on Earth.

Many of life's molecules come in two mirror-image forms, like left and right hands, a property called chirality. Chemistry alone should produce both forms equally, yet living things are lopsided: proteins are built almost entirely from left-handed amino acids, while DNA and RNA twist the other way. One theory holds that life first arose on magnetic surfaces, such as the mineral-rich beds of shallow lakes, because magnetised surfaces can attract one handedness more than the other, an effect Paltiel has studied for years with Weizmann's Professor Ron Naaman.

In the new experiments, led by doctoral student Ofek Vardi, the team passed solutions of the amino acid methionine through filter paper studded with tiny magnetic particles, labelling the molecules with light or heavy carbon atoms so that Sharon's instruments could track them. The filter sorted the molecules not only by handedness but also by isotope: versions containing heavier carbon were consistently pulled more strongly by particles magnetised in one direction, even when the molecules had the same handedness.

Living things also carry a distinctive isotope signature, which geologists use to look for traces of ancient life. The finding suggests a single physical process, rooted in the quantum property called spin, could have shaped both fingerprints at once.