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Optical Isomerism
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Arthur Cushny was very interested in optical isomerism, which he regarded as a key sign of living matter. He had previously carried out various researches in vitro and in vivo, using animals. The paper he co-authored with Alvin Peebles describes some of these experiments in dogs and frogs. These are reported concisely in terms of conclusions, but numerical details were largely absent. The paper ends... with a quite different sort of experiment, a clinical trial reported in sufficient numerical detail to have been awarded a special place in the history of statistics, since the data were used by Student in his famous paper, ‘The Probable Error of a Mean’, and subsequently reported by RA Fisher in his book Statistical Methods for Research Workers.
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The article points out that the common sources of thermodynamic data do not respect optical isomerism though the substantial feature is not recognized. This fact implies widespread imprecisions involved in applications of the sources. The point is illustrated on difluorodisulfane. It is ... pointed out that the chirality partition function plays a substantial role in the relative stabilities of fullerene isomers.
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Many compounds exhibit optical isomerism. Two isomers exist that are identical in every way except that they are mirror images of each other. Naturally occurring compounds in plants and animals are often found as just one of the two isomers.
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The German chemist Viktor Meyer (1848-1897) showed that the bonds of nitrogen atoms, if viewed three-dimensionally, could ... explain certain types of optical isomerism. The English chemist William Jackson Pope (1870-1939) showed this was applicable to other atoms, such as those of sulfur, selenium, and tin; the German-Swiss Alfred Werner (1866-1919) added cobalt, chromium, rhodium, and other metals.
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[D]iscovered by Louis Pasteur nineteenth century, the study of optical isomerism is called stereochemistry. Optical isomers are often called stereoisomers (in fact, stereoisomers constitute a more general group, since stereoisomerism needn't necessarily imply optical activity).
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![Models of optical isomers of asymmetric carbon atoms. [65mod12.JPG]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/o/p/t/optical-isomerism/i/000.jpg)
A very important feature of the structure of amino acids (and other kinds of compounds as well, for that matter) is called optical isomerism. It applies to all amino acids except glycine.
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Optical Isomerism