Today’s Wrong-Handed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In 1849, Louis Pasteur made a groundbreaking discovery about biochemistry. While studying the difference between natural tartaric acid (a harmless waste product of wine production caused by decomposing yeast and grape seeds) and human-made tartaric acid, he discovered that the crystals were exact mirror images of one another, like a right and left hand, a concept called chirality. He also found that life has a strong bias for “left-handed” molecules. Pasteur suggested that chirality was the sole “well-marked line of demarcation that at the present can be drawn between the chemistry of dead matter and the chemistry of living matter.” If you’ve ever wondered what defines life, chemically there’s your answer.
This insight implied that curing diseases would require chiral hormones and chiral biochemicals – something that chemists could not produce in a lab. Scientists began trying to acquire chiral chemicals by distilling essences and hormones from animals, but in the end that proved too arduous. (In the 1920s, two Chicago chemists had to puree several thousand pounds of bull testicles from a stockyard to get a few ounces of the first pure testosterone.) The other possible approach was to ignore Pasteur’s distinction and manufacture both right-handed and left-handed versions of biochemicals. This was actually fairly easy to do because, statistically, reactions that produce handed molecules are equally likely to form righties and lefties. The problem with this approach is that mirror-image molecules have different properties inside the body. The zesty odor of lemons and oranges derives from the same basic molecules, one right-handed and one left-handed. Wrong-handed molecules can even destroy left-handed biology. A German drug company in the 1950s began marketing a remedy for morning sickness in pregnant women, but the benign, curative form of the active ingredient was mixed in with the wrong-handed form because the scientists couldn’t separate them. The freakish birth defects that followed – especially children born without legs or arms, their hands and feet stitched like turtle flippers to their trunks – made thalidomide the most notorious pharmaceutical of the 20th century.
Thalidomide Children