History Main / MirrorChemistry

* In ''ComicBook/FantasticFour2022'', the Four get into a fight with Nicholas Scratch and get hit with a spell that seemingly does nothing, after which Scratch simply leaves, satisfied. After having a [[PottyFailure bad reaction]] to some food, Reed finds out that the spell actually mirrored them on a cellular level, meaning they are unable to digest any food and will eventually starve to death. Reed eventually manages to use the Dark Dimension to reverse the effects but [[FromBadToWorse to his horror]] discovers that despite Johnny's attempts to sterilize them, one mirrored cyanobacteria slipped past and has gotten into a lake turning it into sludge: with no predators on Earth capable of digesting it, said bacteria will eventually consume all the water on Earth and [[ApocalypseHow wipe out the biosphere]]. They manage to kill the bacteria by getting Sue to turn ''the Sun'' briefly invisible.

[[folder:Fan Fiction]]

* ''Literature/DoorwaysInTheSand'' by Creator/RogerZelazny has an "''n''-axial inversion device", which mirror-reverses anyone or anything that passes through it. The protagonist goes through it about halfway through the book. It turns out that quite a few things taste better when you're mirror-reversed. Especially [[ImpossiblyDeliciousFood bourbon]]. This is because although alcohol is symmetric, the various flavorings are not.
** Of course, one has to be careful when using the device. One unfortunate individual accidentally goes through the wrong way and gets turned [[{{Squick}} inside out]]!

** Referenced darkly in Creator/AlanMoore's ''Comicbook/TheLeagueOfExtraordinaryGentlemen''; in a text feature in Vol. 2, it is revealed that Alice emerged from the Looking Glass world with her entire body mirror-reversed. As a result, she was unable to eat normal food, and ultimately starved to death.

[[folder:Web Comics]]
* ''Webcomic/{{Freefall}}''. [[http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff800/fv00710.htm In the 'garden-world' of Pfouts,]] life developed with opposite chirality as compared to humans, making it more inhospitable to human colonization than a bare ball of rock could ever be. Thus, some clever humans are speculating about uplifting a local species to sentience, thus gaining a colony-by-extension for humanity. One of the main characters is an [[UpliftedAnimal uplifted wolf]], made as a proof-of-concept for that endeavour.

[[folder:Web Original]]

* One ''Series/StargateSG1'' fanfic mentions a right-handed world being used as a prison planet. Plenty of oxygen, but if you escape the prison camp there's absolutely nothing to eat. Unless you [[spoiler: dismember the guards]].

* One of the stories in ''Literature/CallahansCrosstimeSaloon'' has a "Mirror Earth" with right-handed proteins in the place of our left-handed ones. A con artist discovers a means to travel between the two, but finds that there's little he can do with it; EquivalentExchange is in effect - if he does anything that benefits one world at the expense of the other, the gate will fail, possibly trapping him in a world where he can't digest the food. He finally hits on ethanol; it's not a chiral molecule as said above, but the esters (which determine taste and texture) are. Result: one world's really bad moonshine whiskey is the other's Wonderbooze.

* ''Series/BlackHoleHigh'': Episode "Chirality": The concept of Left- and Right-handed molecules are introduced in a chemistry class -- then used it as a justification for a PersonalitySwap episode.

* Receptors for proteins, hormones, and other organic chemical compounds are made to fit certain molecular structures of a certain chirality. If a molecule does not have the correct chirality, it doesn't fit in the receptor, or worse, can actively harm the organism. As if that's not enough, the human body can sometimes metabolize a useful structure into its harmful mirror image. This was what happened with Thalidomide - a certain chiral structure (also called an enantiomer) of the compound was useful for the effects of morning sickness in pregnant women, but the other enantiomer of it caused terrible birth defects. The early testing of the compound was performed on just the desired enatiomer, but the mass-production synthesis method produced a racemic form (Note that ScienceMarchesOn ... this story is probably still told to first year organic chemistry students as a cautionary tale about the importance of chirality, but it turns out that thalidomide racemizes ''in vivo'' and even if the testing was done with one chirally pure form, some of it would have converted to the other enantiomer as soon as it was taken). This is also the case with the cancer-fighting drug Platinol, which only causes sickness because scientists can't separate the helpful enantiomer of the drug from the toxic one, so it's sold as a mixture of the two (any mixture of both enantiomers of a compound is called a racemic mixture).

* Website/SCPFoundation:

*** Same with alcohol per se, as ethanol is, in fact, ''not'' chiral. So, if the bar happened to be out of stock on Turian brandy, triple-filtered, ordinary vodka would flow just the same through your emergency induction port.

*** Same with alcohol per se, as ethanol is, in fact, ''not'' chiral. So, if the bar happened to be out of stock on Turian brandy, triple-filtered, ordinary vodka would substitute just fine.

* Wiki/SCPFoundation:

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** In case you're wondering, ''Mass Effect'' pulls a major case of ArtisticLicenseBiology with this. Turns out the amino acid differences aren't dangerous to those that use the other ones. If anything they'd [https://web.archive.org/web/20181130152334/http://darthempress.tumblr.com/post/21009439428/dextro-wont-kill-you-honey-still-proceed-with taste like mint or some kind of sugar.]]

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[[folder:Web Original ]]

[[folder:Real Life ]]

Many of the molecules required for life have the property known as [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry) chirality]] or "handedness". That is, they are not the same as their mirror image, like a left shoe which will not fit properly on your right foot no matter how you rotate it. That wouldn't have been that much of a problem, if not for the one insignificant fact that a lot of the stuff our bodies are made of, mainly the amino acids, which are the building blocks for the proteins we consist of, are chiral. And ''all'' multicellular organisms on Earth are made of L-(or levo-)amino acids.[[note]]This is not to be confused with the molecule's optical activity: that is, if we shine a light through its solution, l-isomer will rotate its polarization plane (a plane the EM-wave is oscillating) to the left, that is, counter-clockwise, and d-isomer, or dextrorotatory one, will do it to the right, or clockwise. Many L-isomers are in fact l- (or (-), as chemists now prefer to designate them) isomers, and vice versa, but it's not true for all of them.[[/note]] Dextro-amino acids (except cysteine) are exceedingly rare in Earth organisms and are used only by some bacteria and in a few very specialized cases by larger creatures. Science-fiction writers have commonly ShownTheirWork by referencing this fact. It generally comes up in one of two situations:

In either case, this usually manifests itself as an inability to eat the same food in the same way. Either food tastes different depending on your handedness, or wrong-handed food has no nutritional value or is actively dangerous. There may be some mention of the fact that ethanol is a biologically interesting molecule that doesn't have this property -- so, regardless of chirality, everyone can always get drunk together, and you can make moonshine from organic stuff that's otherwise useless for you because it's of the wrong chirality (assuming you have the right, or rather the left, handedness of microbes).

** In case you're wondering, ''Mass Effect'' pulls a major case of ArtisticLicenseBiology with this. Turns out the amino acid differences aren't dangerous to those that use the other ones. If anything they'd [[http://darthempress.tumblr.com/post/21009439428/dextro-wont-kill-you-honey-still-proceed-with taste like mint or some kind of sugar.]]

* In ''[[Literature/AliceInWonderland Through the Looking Glass]]'', Alice speculates that looking-glass milk might not be good to drink. This is probably the UrExample; in fact, it predates the coining of the word "chirality" by several years. In ''The Annotated Alice'', Martin Gardner discusses the chemical reasons why this would be true, before moving on to point out that looking-glass milk would likely be made of antimatter,[[note]]probably not, because if the milk were antimatter everything else in the looking-glass world would be too, and Alice wouldn't have lived long enough to wonder about it,[[/note]] making it ''[[StuffBlowingUp really]]'' bad to drink.
** Referenced darkly in Creator/AlanMoore's ''Comicbook/TheLeagueOfExtraordinaryGentlemen''; in a text feature in Vol. 2, it is revealed that Alice emerged from the Looking Glass world with her entire body mirror-reversed. As a result, she was unable to eat normal food, and ultimately starved to death.
* ''Literature/DoorwaysInTheSand'' by Creator/RogerZelazny has an "''n''-axial inversion device", which mirror-reverses anyone or anything that passes through it. The protagonist goes through it about halfway through the book. It turns out that quite a few things taste better when you're mirror-reversed. Especially [[ImpossiblyDeliciousFood bourbon]]. This is because although alcohol is symmetric, the various flavorings are not.
** Of course, one has to be careful when using the device. One unfortunate individual accidentally goes through the wrong way and gets turned [[{{Squick}} inside out]]!
* In ''Literature/ThereAndBackAgain'' by Pat Murphy, anyone who passes through a wormhole gets mirror-reversed. Any gathering of people who have done a lot of wormhole travel needs two cooks: one for the travelers who are currently "right-handed" (having passed through an odd number of wormholes) and one for the ones who are "left-handed" (having passed through an even number).

* ''Literature/SpockMustDie'' has a mirror-reversed copy of Spock created in a transporter accident. He's unable to eat anything, and so he finds himself slowly starving while he works with a chemistry set in order to create mirrored food he can eat and survive.
* ''Literature/TourOfTheMerrimack'': The crew aren't worried about picking up any diseases in the Myriad because life on those worlds uses opposite-handed proteins, which are incompatible with human biology. It's likened to attempting to attach a four-post wheel to a five-post axle with opposite-thread bolts. It is also mentioned that [[HordeOfAlienLocusts the Hive]] is unique among all known species in that it is able to digest proteins of either chirality.

* Creator/MartiSteussy's ''Literature/DreamsOfDawn'': Juvenile (and not yet sapient) Kargan natives like the taste of terrestrial food, but it can cause their metamorphosis process to go fatally awry [[spoiler:thanks to some meddling by AbusivePrecursors]]. The side effects of Kargan food on terrestrial species likewise range from indigestion to fatalities. [[spoiler:Solved at the end by altering the colonists' biochemistry to match that of the native species, after much [[HeroicSacrifice trial and error]].]]
* ''Literature/ThePentagonWar'': Centaurian metabolism is based around levulorotary glucose (instead of the dextrorotary glucose we Earth people use). Centaurian food has no nutritional value to humans, and can sometimes be downright poisonous to them -- and vice-versa.
* Creator/ArthurCClarke's "Literature/TechnicalError": An experimental superconducting power station accidentally inverts Richard Nelson so that all his body chemistry is opposite-handed. He needs to have special "left-handed" food synthesized for him, and since no one is sure if we've missed any essential micronutrients that would also need to be inverted for him, he figures his best option for long-term survival is to repeat the accident and try to re-invert himself.

* In ''The Documents in the Case'' by Creator/DorothyLSayers, stereochemistry is proof that the death was a murder, not an accidental poisoning -- the poison is optically inactive (and hence produced by synthesis in a laboratory) rather than optically active (as it would have been if it came from a poisonous toadstool eaten by mistake).

* Many colony worlds in the ''TabletopGame/TwentyThreeHundredAD'' universe have dextro-based life. To get around this, human colonists sterilize large patches of ground and use "pay dirt" from Earth to set up a localized biosphere suitable for growing crops. On the other hand, many native creatures from dextro-worlds (most infamously [[EverythingIsTryingToKillYou Aurore]]) will take a bite out of humans or their livestock without worrying whether it will make them sick.

** One of the items vended by [[http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-261 SCP-261]], an anomalous vending machine, is a bar of Hershey's with all text mirrored. Scientific analysis of the chocolate reveals the chirality of the amino acids and sugars that it contains is the opposite to those of Earth-life organic compounds.

* In ''Webcomic/{{LeavingTheCradle}}'' [[BeePeople insectoid]] species are D-chiral, which makes them incompatible with other species biochemically, much like turians from Franchise/MassEffect. This sometimes causes some political problems, since their preferred method of colonizing other life-supporting worlds is to terraform them by blazing large patches of the continent to cinder and reseed it with samples of their own ecosystem.

[[folder: Live-Action TV ]]

[[folder: Tabletop Games ]]

[[folder: Video Games ]]

[[folder: Web Comics ]]

[[folder: Web Original ]]

[[folder: Real Life ]]

** In case you're wondering, Mass Effect pulls a major case of ArtisticLicenseBiology with this. Turns out the amino acid differences aren't dangerous to the other ones. If anything they'd [[http://darthempress.tumblr.com/post/21009439428/dextro-wont-kill-you-honey-still-proceed-with taste like mint or some kind of sugar]].

* ''Webcomic/{{Freefall}}''. [[http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff800/fv00710.htm In the 'garden-world' of Pfouts]], life developed with opposite chirality as compared to humans, making it more inhospitable to human colonization than a bare ball of rock could ever be. Thus, some clever humans are speculating about uplifting a local species to sentience, thus gaining a colony-by-extension for humanity. One of the main characters is an [[UpliftedAnimal uplifted wolf]], made as a proof-of-concept for that endeavour.

* In ''[[Literature/AliceInWonderland Through the Looking Glass]]'', Alice speculates that looking-glass milk might not be good to drink. This is probably the UrExample; in fact, it predates the coining of the word "chirality" by several years. In ''The Annotated Alice'', Martin Gardner discusses the chemical reasons why this would be true, before moving on to point out that looking-glass milk would likely be made of antimatter[[note]]probably not, because if the milk were antimatter everything else in the looking-glass world would be too, and Alice wouldn't have lived long enough to wonder about it[[/note]], making it ''[[StuffBlowingUp really]]'' bad to drink.

* From the files of the Wiki/SCPFoundation comes [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-739 SCP-739]], a small closet with mirrored interiors. Closing a person in the booth once will flip all their amino-chains. Closing them in twice will switch them back, but repeating the experiment too many times with the same subject leads to [[CameBackWrong something else emerging]]. As a [[MundaneUtility fun side benefit]], locking sugar packets in the closet will flip them as well. The scientist specifically notes that they would make excellent diet sweeteners.
• Also, one of the items vended by SCP-261 is a bar of Hershey's with all text mirrored. Scientific analysis of the chocolate reveals the chirality of the amino acids and sugars that it contains is the opposite to those of Earth-life organic compounds.