Stereochemistry Quotes

In 1967, I had formed a collaboration with Hermann Eggerer, then of Muenchen, and together, we solved the problem of the 'asymmetric methyl group' and applied the solution in some of the many ways that have proved possible.

By 1954, as an assistant professor with a group of three graduate students, I was able to initiate more complex experimental projects, dealing with the structure, stereochemistry and synthesis of natural products. As a result of the success of this research, I was appointed in 1956, at age twenty-seven, as professor of chemistry.

Enantiomers often smell and taste differently.

The artificial products do not have any molecular dissymmetry; and I could not indicate the existence of a more profound separation between the products born under the influence of life and all the others.

Many transition states have a well-defined preferred geometrical requirement.

The essential principles of the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules had been correctly formulated by the first Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Jacobus van't Hoff, as early as 1874.

Are the atoms of the dextroacid (tartaric) grouped in the spirals of a right-hand helix or situated at the angles of an irregular tetrahedron, or arranged in such or such particular unsymmetrical fashion? We are unable to reply to these questions. But there can be no reason for doubting that the grouping of the atoms has an unsymmetrical arrangement with a non-superimposable image. It is not less certain that the atoms of the laevo-acid realize precisely an unsymmetrical arrangement of the inverse of the above.

An object is chiral if it cannot be brought into congruence with its mirror image by translation and rotation.

If the polymer chain assumes a helicoidal conformation in the crystalline state, and if it does not contain asymmetric carbon atoms, it can be expected that either helices of the same sense, or, in equal ratio, helices of opposite sense are represented in the lattice.

The structural difference between enantiomers can be serious with respect to the actions of synthetic drugs.