Drug enantiomers and the elderly : one drug or two?

Abstract

"All artificial bodies and all minerals have superimposable images. Opposed to these are nearly all organic substances which play an important role in plant and animal life. These are assymetric, and indeed have the kind of symmetry in which the image is not superimposable with the object." Chemical and pharmacological laboratories are generally misleading nonchiral environments, but the universe at its most fundamental level is handed, being made up of molecules, sugars and amino acids whose stereochemistry is absolutely defined. It is not therefore surprising that living organisms are able to discriminate between the two enantiomers of an exogenous chiral compound and large differences occur between the responses they evoke. It may seem strange that we have lost sight of a phenomenon whose importance was first made apparent 100 years ago.