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