CHIRALITY201072-10842008 Review Article When Did Louis Pasteur Present His Memoir on the Discovery of Molecular Chirality to the Academie Des Sciences? Analysis of a Discrepancy JOSEPH GAL* Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology.University of Colorado School of Medicine.Denver.Colorado Dedicated to the16Amniversary of Louis Pasteur's Discovery ABSTRACT sented his histo in ra ectedw 15h,1848 vorks edited by his grandsor Paris,his mother died in Arbois,e tern franc e.Informed at an unknown point in time dere inco tion of the record by the biographer relatives.pre hisnd the 10710.20 KEY WORDS:di INTRODUCTION some substances ered and of compounds,all natura nine pha d his ugnt in ry to the Acad emy of Sci in the noncryst alline state required that some aspe the e for the rotation.and he referred to such compounds stances mo 1 and of the e of the otherwise indicate but an explana on of the phenon een ontical tation and THE DISCOVERY OF MOLECULAR CHIRALITY structure when he discovered molecular chirality RraOoialoaio lices rota of "plane-pola d 29 N mber 20 /chi Baptiste Biot (177416)found.beginning in 1815.that 2008 Wiley-Liss.Inc. Review Article When Did Louis Pasteur Present His Memoir on the Discovery of Molecular Chirality to the Academie Des Sciences
? Analysis of a Discrepancy JOSEPH GAL* Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Denver, Colorado Dedicated to the 160th Anniversary of Louis Pasteur’s Discovery ABSTRACT Louis Pasteur presented his historic memoir on the discovery of molec￾ular chirality to the Acade´mie des sciences in Paris on May 22nd, 1848. The literature, however, nearly completely ignores this date, widely claiming instead May 15th, 1848, which first surfaced in 1922 in Pasteur’s collected works edited by his grandson Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot. On May 21st, 1848, i.e., one day before Pasteur’s presentation in Paris, his mother died in Arbois, eastern France. Informed at an unknown point in time that she was ‘‘very ill,’’ Pasteur left for Arbois only after his presentation. Biographies of Pasteur by his son-in-law Rene´ Vallery-Radot or the grandson, and Pasteur’s collected correspondence edited by the grandson are incomprehensibly laconic or silent about the historic presentation. While no definite conclusions are possible, the evidence strongly suggests a deliberate alteration of the record by the biographer relatives, pre￾sumably for fear of adverse public judgment of Pasteur for a real or perceived insensitiv￾ity to a grave family medical emergency. Such fear would have been in accord with their hagiographic portrayal of Pasteur, and the findings raise questions concerning the extent of their zeal in protecting his ‘‘demigod’’ image. Universal recognition of the true date of Pasteur’s announcement of molecular chirality is long overdue. Chirality 20:1072–1084, 2008. VC 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. KEY WORDS: discovery of molecular chirality; enantiomorphism; falsification of history; hagiography; stereochemistry; history of chemistry; Pasteur; biography INTRODUCTION Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), a chemist by training, discov￾ered molecular chirality in 1848, and thereby made a funda￾mentally important contribution to chemistry and several other fields, e.g., crystallography, biochemistry, pharmacol￾ogy, clinical therapeutics, etc. He presented his revolutionary discovery to the Acade´mie des sciences (Academy of Sciences, Acade´mie henceforth) in Paris in May of the same year, but the correct date of his presentation has been nearly com￾pletely ignored and instead an incorrect date has widely per￾sisted in the literature to the present day. In this report the circumstances, causes and implications of the emergence and widespread acceptance of the wrong date are analyzed. THE DISCOVERY OF MOLECULAR CHIRALITY Background Optical rotation was discovered by the French physicist Franc¸ois Arago (1786–1853) when he found, in 1811, that crystalline quartz slices rotated the plane of ‘‘plane-polar￾ized’’ (i.e., circularly polarized) light.1 Subsequently, Jean￾Baptiste Biot (1774–1862) found,1 beginning in 1815, that some substances rotate polarized light in the noncrystal￾line state, e.g., in the liquid or gas phase or in solution, and by the mid-1840s a variety of compounds, all natural products (e.g., tartaric acid, oil of turpentine, camphor, qui￾nine, morphine, brucine, various sugars, albumin, etc.), were known to rotate polarized light in the noncrystalline state.2 Biot understood that optical rotation by substances in the noncrystalline state required that some aspect of the structure of the molecules themselves was responsible for the rotation, and he referred3 to such compounds as ‘‘substances mole´culairement actives’’ (molecularly active substances; translations are by the present author unless otherwise indicated), but an explanation of the phenom￾enon was not available. It was Louis Pasteur who made the connection between optical rotation and molecular structure when he discovered molecular chirality. 4 *Correspondence to: Joseph Gal, Division of Clinical Pharmacology C 237, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, 4200 East 9th Avenue, Denver, CO 80262. E-mail: joe.gal@uchsc.edu Received for publication 1 October 2007; Accepted 29 November 2007 DOI: 10.1002/chir.20532 Published online 17 March 2008 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). CHIRALITY 20:1072–1084 (2008) VC 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc