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      20                               THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER

 

One of the most remarkable of the many brilliant things done by the illustrious French chemist, Louis Pasteur, was the giving of two public scientific lectures, in 1860, “On the Asymmetry of Naturally Occurring Organic Compounds,” which include the albumins, sugars, starches, etc., found or formed in animals or plants. In a scientific instrument, known as the polarimeter, these compounds always rotate the plane of polarized light to the right or to the left. Therefore, by chemists they are described briefly as dextro- or laevo- (d- or 1-) compounds— for example, dextrose, or d-sugar, and laevulose, or l-sugar. That is, as they occur in living nature, animals or plants, they are never “ compensated mixtures” of both stereo­isomers—never, for instance, of dextrose and laevulose—­and in such “ compensated mixtures “ all rotation is absent, because the one compound twists the plane of polarized light as much to the right as the other does to the left. When the chemist is able to manufacture any of these compounds in the laboratory, he has never been able to make the one compound, the 1- one, without an equal amount of the other, the d- one. To get them separated he has had to employ expedients, such as fer­mentation by yeast, etc., when one of the two might be attacked and pulled down, but not the other. The fact that all living organisms, whether animal or plant, manu­facture or contain invariably only the one stereo-isomer, and not the other, has often been commented upon. Thus, by Professor W. J. Pope, who writes that while d-glucose (d.-sugar) is a valuable foodstuff, we should be unable to digest its opposite or antithesis, l-glucose, although they have the. same chemical composition— that is, are isomers or stereo-isomers. Humanity is, therefore, according to him, composed of dextro-men and dextro-women ; and, putting his words, which will

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