Categories: Biographical notes
Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895) was a French chemist who was important in establishing the germ theory of disease, and in investigating fermentation of foods by microorgansms. He also identified the phenomenon of stereo-isomerism – that some chemical structures exist in two mirror-image forms (enantiomers) that cannot be made to overalp. (A reflection of a methane, CH4, molecular structure can be made to overlap with the orignal simply by rotating it around one of its principal axes. However this would not be true of the bromochlorofluouromethane structure, CHBrFCl, which exists in two distinct forms.)
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