The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.

Five, four, three, two, one. Hello everybody welcome to this special episode of

into the impossible.

Recently the University of California San Diego Institute for the Arts and Humanities

commemorated the 100th birthday of Primo Levy with a symposium remembering his life and the example he said of uniting scientific and

literary cultures. Primo Levy was a chemist, a writer, and a survivor of

Auschwitz. He said that stitching together molecules taught him to

stitch together words and ideas. This episode of Into the Impossible is

dedicated to the memory of Primo Levy.

Today we're going to have a conversation with Dr. Luca Lignani.

He's a research fellow at the Scripps Institute and he studies, among other things, the origins of life and how that is affected by the chirality of molecules.

So why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about you and how you get into this work.

Yeah, hi everybody. Yes, my name is Luca Leningani and this is the field I'm studying, so I'm a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Professor

Blackmond.

And what we are trying to understand or to collect more evidences about is the general picture is the origin of life.

So our life started on our planet and more specifically how is the origin of homo carolitis.

So why the molecules that are part of our body and

part of the body of many living organisms, why they have a specific clarity and how this started.

So Luca, you're obviously Italian, primo Livi Italian so you that you know about him what was it about his work that inspired you

yeah well primo levy is very famous in Italy and worldwide, mainly because of his work about the Holocaust during the Second World War, but Primoevi was also a chemist and he was inspired by chemistry, so he wrote many short stories about chemistry.

And I'm pretty sure, I would say that also with these short stories with these writing you're so inspired

different generations of chemists for sure in Italy but I'm also pretty sure worldwide.

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