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Comment by ocfnash | Hacker News Reader

This was news to me and pretty striking:

> The concept of orientability has important implications. Take enantiomers. These chemical compounds have the same chemical structures except for one key difference: they are mirror images of one another. For example, the chemical L-methamphetamine is an ingredient in Vicks inhalers. Its mirror image, D-methamphetamine, is a Class A illegal drug. If we lived in a nonorientable world, these chemicals would be indistinguishable.

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> If we lived in a nonorientable world, these chemicals would be indistinguishable.

True, but you might have to move such a molecule arbitrarily far ("all the way around the Mobius strip") in order to change it from one enantiomer to ther other.

In a non-orientable world, we would not have lived to enjoy the confusion between medicine and illegal drugs - we would die from our inability to consume L-sugars thanks to our entire glycolysis cycle being 100% D-oriented.

It's a bit anthropic but if humans had evolved on a non orientable universe that wouldn't be a problem.

A particularly infamous example of this is Thalidomide, a drug for pregnant women whose mirror can cause birth defects.

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/molecule-of-the-week/arch...

Millions of Breaking Bad fans already know this right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnmWTruibMY :-)

I had too look up "Class A" apparently the UK has a separate classification system for legal and illegal possession of drugs. The US has no such separate formal system for illegal possession of prescription drugs, but rather a patchwork set of laws, while having 5 "schedules" for availability of prescription drugs.

D-methamphetamine, for example is Schedule-II which means you can get a prescription for it, but there are several controls.

Didn't somebody make a fully synthetic bacterium? Flipping that around, making a sort of enantiomer bacterium, would be fascinating. Someday we could make a whole little toy ecosystem of mirror image organisms. Give it a century, and maybe we could do people.

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