Comment by dekhn
10 hours ago
I remember first learning about chirality in my biochemistry course in college, and it was definitely a mind-blower. I had already started to understand that molecules had 3d structures, but the idea (and attempting to visualize it mentally) of mirror image molecules stretched my brain significantly.
It's also still amazing to me how people first recognized this: poking around looking at the crystals that form in the bottom of a wine under a microscope, noticing that some of them were mirror images of the other, and then seperating them manually with tweezer, dissolving them into two different solutions, and demonstrating that they rotated light in opposite directions.
Sodium-ammonium tartrate (I remembered what you were talking about, but had to look up the actual chemical!)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9291139/
From that:
"To his surprise, he noticed that each crystal has a tiny facet on one of its edges oriented sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. He could separate them by hand with a tweezer."
It's moments like that, and Kekule's story of the snake dream for benzene that make me feel unworthy of being a scientist. I sometimes wonder: in my career of looking at things, did I miss something fundamental and significant simply because my powers of observation and general intelligence were insufficient?
If you think Kekule's story is wild, you should read about how Kary Mullis came up with the idea for the polymerase chain reaction!
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Well, I don't know that every scientist has to have poetic dreams about snakes (Kekule) or apples (Newton).
Weirdly I often have dreams where I am 'solving' some problem, however on waking I realise the details are nonsense - not just the solution, but the problem itself. I think dreams are often a way to just exercise and sort memories and ideas. There is no reasoning involved.
A lot of science is just process, or multiple careful experimentation. Preparing for getting lucky is another matter.
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Btw, all this is explained in the "popular information" tab on the Nobel page. Always very interesting and easy to follow:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2026/popular-inf...
The paths we all take to the same knowledge is hilarious to me. I learned about chirality in my mid twenties while playing mass effect lol
For me as early as high school it was easy to understand the concept of molecules having 3D structure (the standard textbook explanation of left glove versus right glove is easy), but it was really difficult for me to visualize it. I was not and am still not a visual thinker. This caused me a lot of problems when I needed to distinguish between enantiomers. For example I had a great deal of trouble when given two molecules that only differ in chirality, which one is levo and which is dextro, despite studying very hard.
At least for me (because I have aphantasia) I found that using molecular visualization apps (ideally with 3D stereo glasses) makes a huge difference. I can sort of rotate the molecules around and build up a working mental picture that way.
It was a 100 level O-Chem lesson for me: We had the physical ball-and-stick models.
Enantiomers and Diastereomers are one of the more interesting and challenging things in Organic Chemistry. It also makes carbohydrate chemistry challenging in Biochem.