Louis Pasteur · Science
How a 26-year-old chemist, sorting microscopic crystals with a tweezers under a lens, discovered that the molecules of living things come in left- and right-handed forms - and that life itself prefers one hand. It was the first glimpse of molecular asymmetry, and Pasteur thought it the deepest thing he ever found.
You learned that Pasteur found two kinds of tartaric acid crystal that were mirror images of one another, and that only one of them is made by living things. In your own words, explain what ‘molecular handedness’ (chirality) means, how Pasteur detected it by hand-sorting crystals, and why he came to believ…
Leads to Antoine Lavoisier.
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