PASTEURS ANNOUNCEMENT OF MOLECULAR CHIRALITY:A DISCREPANCY 1079 of May 30th,1881,on rabies4;etc.To summarize,the pre- entations by Pasteur to the Acadmie.For example.in Mo n (see above) tation of the molecular chirality. junction with her death. The Works of LPVR The (Euvres. Other works by lPVr.In addition to the Eyures and date of the h eu rand write minin the article ned h the atisfaction with which before,pres shed writ and membe at the phasis) Thus,here too,LPVR places the my mie fran ever. he gives no date or the entlyfrom his handlingof othe er presentations by Pas detailed chrond gical table of Pasteur's wo an exten. to have 1.the ror t here that Jacqu vo ement to the Acad ate Jacques (1901 Works by Other Authors of Pasteur. and his cle 192 tions. bgpiyubishedn196O,IpRde cribes his adm s of the c documentary recordo number o ocuments (pu on arge ortionsof h th prepa sobogapay Aside from the abo he cte sources cited many of th ion on her illne or deat on hi fo L the presentation e evce.The lett corr ection of the erro us date has und in the lit her's il ng that in the Correspondance we find no ater ery of n olecuar chiral- claim:the Comptes s clearly and unequivocally indi Chirality DOI 10.1002/chinof May 30th, 1881, on rabies64; etc. To summarize, the pre￾sentation by Pasteur of the discovery of molecular chirality to the Acade´mie is conspicuously and inexplicably absent from RVR’s biographies of Pasteur. Moreover, no informa￾tion is provided by RVR on the circumstances of the death of Pasteur’s mother or on Pasteur’s trip to Arbois in con￾junction with her death. The Works of LPVR The Œuvres. The editorial inclusion of the incorrect date, May 15, 1848, in the Œuvres for Pasteur’s presenta￾tion to the Acade´mie25 is puzzling because the date of the session for any presentation appearing in the Comptes rendus is immediately obvious upon examining the article in the particular volume it appears in, as discussed earlier. LPVR was a distinguished professor of medicine, a noted medical researcher, accomplished writer, and member of the Acade´mie de Me´decine (Academy of Medicine) and the prestigious Acade´mie franc¸aise (French Academy [of let￾ters]).65,66 It is difficult indeed to understand that he could have failed to extract the correct date from the Comptes rendus. The Œuvres were published during the period of 1922–1939. The final volume, 7, dated 1939, contains a detailed chronological table of Pasteur’s work, an exten￾sive index, and other material. In the chronological table, Pasteur’s presentation to the Acade´mie of the discovery of molecular chirality is still shown67 to have taken place on May 15th 1848. Thus, after its first appearance in Volume 1 in 1922, the error was repeated 17 yr later in Volume 7. It is also relevant here that Jacques Nicolle’s 1953 vol￾ume on Pasteur gives the correct date of Pasteur’s pre￾sentation,26 as mentioned above. Jacques Nicolle (1901– 1971)68 was a French physicist, director of the Laboratory of Biochemistry of Isomers of the E´ cole pratique des hautes e´tudes, Paris. His father, Maurice Nicolle69 (1862– 1932), was a collaborator of Pasteur, and his uncle, Charles Nicolle (1866–1936), also a disciple of Pasteur, was a Nobel laureate (1928) bacteriologist.70 In his auto￾biography (published in 1966), LPVR describes his admi￾ration for and close friendship with Charles Nicolle,71 and also indicates that he knew Maurice Nicolle.72 In light of the above and considering LPVR’s exhaustive work on Pasteur, it would be difficult to believe that LPVR was not aware of Jacques Nicolle’s publications on Pasteur, and the true date of the presentation therein. LPVR does not mention Jacques Nicolle (who was his contemporary) in his autobiography. The Correspondance. Aside from the above-cited let￾ters by Pasteur from Arbois concerning his mother’s death no other information on her illness or death or on his return to Arbois in connection with these events is found in the letters included in the Correspondance. The letter Pasteur refers to which informed him of his mother’s ill￾ness does not appear in the Correspondance. It is also troubling that in the Correspondance we find no letter by or to Pasteur about his momentous announce￾ment to the Acade´mie of the discovery of molecular chiral￾ity. This lack is most puzzling in view of the presence in the Correspondance of many letters referring to other presentations by Pasteur to the Acade´mie. For example, in a letter73 to Chappuis dated May 5, 1848, Pasteur expressed satisfaction over the favorable reception (‘‘tre` s bien accueilli’’) of the memoir on dimorphism (see above) which he had read to the Acade´mie ca. 2 mo before the presentation of the memoir on molecular chirality. Another example is that of the presentation of January 3rd, 1853,74 etc. Other works by LPVR. In addition to the Œuvres and the Correspondance, LPVR produced several other volumes about Pasteur, including a short biography in which he gives the date of the death of Pasteur’s mother and writes that ‘‘she died suddenly.’’ He then adds that ‘‘Pasteur’s grief was hardly lessened by the satisfaction with which he had, a few days before, presented at the Academy of Sci￾ences’’ his memoir on molecular dissymmetry75 [my em￾phasis]. Thus, here too, LPVR places the presentation before the death of Pasteur’s mother on May 21st; how￾ever, here he gives no date for the presentation. In addition to placing the presentation before May 21st, LPVR treats Pasteur’s historic announcement very differ￾ently from his handling of other presentations by Pasteur to the Acade´mie, several of which are given by date in the biography.76–78 Moreover, on October 26, 1868, shortly af￾ter Pasteur suffered a stroke, Dumas read a note by Pas￾teur to the Acade´mie, and this too is mentioned79 by date in the biography by LPVR. The contrast is striking and it is, again, difficult to comprehend why Pasteur’s historic announcement to the Acade´mie of his first major discovery is almost entirely ignored by LPVR. LPVR died in 1970, and a search of the literature failed to identify a correction by him of the erroneous date. Works by Other Authors Since his death more than a century ago, Pasteur’s life and work has been the subject of numerous other publica￾tions. In recent years, several authors have studied exten￾sive portions of the considerable documentary record of Pasteur’s life and work. Geison, for example, examined a large number of archival sources and documents (pub￾lished and unpublished) in France and elsewhere for his volume, and the French writers Debre´ and MVR also drew on large portions of the documentary record in the prepa￾ration of their biographies. Nevertheless, all three authors cite the wrong date for Pasteur’s presentation to the Acade´mie. 34–36 For the purposes of this article, in addition to the sources cited earlier, many other publications80–94 on Pasteur were examined but none of these mention a specific date for the presentation in May 1848. Moreover, no discussion of the discrepancy in the date of the presentation or any correction of the erroneous date has been found in the lit￾erature. However, in one of their articles, Kauffman and Myers state95 that Pasteur’s presentation took place on May 15th, 1848, and the memoir published a week later, i.e., on the 22nd. There is, however, no basis for their claim: the Comptes rendus clearly and unequivocally indi￾cates the session in which a memoir was presented, as dis￾cussed above. To further illustrate, on the 12th of August, PASTEUR’S ANNOUNCEMENT OF MOLECULAR CHIRALITY: A DISCREPANCY 1079 Chirality DOI 10.1002/chir