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Pasteur and chirality: A story of how serendipity favors the prepared minds
Ghislaine Vantomme1, Jeanne Crassous2
1Institute for Complex Molecular Systems and Laboratory of Macromolecular and Organic Chemistry, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Chirality
|August 7, 2021
Abstract:
During the XIXth century, France has been the theater of many discoveries in stereochemistry thanks to prestigious physicists, chemists, and crystallographers. Among them, Louis Pasteur is certainly the father of molecular chirality (the so-called molecular dissymmetry), and because of the exceptionally favored conditions of his famous discovery on the resolution of tartrates, his findings have often been attributed to serendipity. But let us not forget that "in the fields of observation, chance only favors the prepared minds."