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Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Nicholas Leadbeater of the University of Connecticut explains how slight differences in molecules can have significant and possibly devastating consequences.
Nicholas Leadbeater is an associate professor of organic and inorganic chemistry at the University of Connecticut, where he heads the New Synthetic Methods Group. Leadbeater and the NSMG research cleaner and more efficient methods for creating synthetic materials. Dr. Leadbeater holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, where he was a research fellow until 1999.
Dr. Nicholas Leadbeater - Right and Left Handed Molecules
I am not a very good navigator when going on road trips. I am always confusing my right and my left. One solution I have found is to look at my hands closely. I can make an "L" shape with my thumb and index finger of my left hand, indicating the word "left". When I try to do the same with my right hand the shape I get is a backwards "L". This is because my hands are mirror images of each other. Many molecules also possess this property of handedness - or chirality, in chemistry speak.
The two hands of a chiral molecule can have very different properties. For example, one hand of the compound carvone smells like spearmint and the other smells like caraway seeds. Handedness of a molecule was also responsible for what has been called one of the biggest medical tragedies of modern times.
As well as being a powerful painkiller, the drug thalidomide was also found to relieve the effects of morning sickness and so thousands of pregnant women regularly took it. However, many children were born with deformities as a consequence of its use. The drug, a chiral molecule, was administered as both hands but while one had beneficial effects, the other led to the birth defects. Today, in the pharmaceutical industry the effects of both hands of chiral compounds are very carefully studied before any drug reaches the shelf.