Researches on the molecular asymmetry of natural organic products / by Louis Pasteur (1860).

  • Pasteur, Louis, 1822-1895.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Researches on the molecular asymmetry of natural organic products / by Louis Pasteur (1860). Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that there is only a single case in which the right mole¬ cules differ from the left, the case where they are sub¬ mitted to influences of an asymmetric character. Do these asymmetric actions, possibly placed under cosmic influences, reside in light, in electricity, in magnetism, or in heat ? Can they be related to the motion of the earth, or to the electric currents by which physicists explain the terrestrial magnetic poles? It is not even possible at the present time to express the slightest conjecture in this direction. But I regard as necessary the conclusion that asym¬ metric forces exist at the moment of the elaboration of natural organic products ; forces which would be absent, or ineffectual, in the reactions of our laboratories either on account of the violent course of these phenomena, or because of some other unknown circumstance. XII. We now reach a final experiment which does not yield in interest to any of those which precede, in respect to the manifest proof which it will give us of the influence of asymmetry in the phenomena of life. We have just seen asymmetry intervening to modify chemical affinities; but the reactions involved were purely inorganic, artificial, and we know all the prudence that must be observed in the application of the results of the laboratory to the phenomena of life. On this account I kept to myself almost all the views expressed in this Lecture till the moment that I recognised in the most certain manner that molecular asymmetry exhibited itself as a modifier, no longer of the reactions of inorganic nature, but of those of physiological character, in fermentations. Here is the remarkable phenomenon to which I refer : It had long been known, from the observation of a