Chemical chirality in popular fiction

The theme of chemical chirality, or the "handedness" of the molecular structure of certain substances, appears in many works of fiction.

Although little was known about chemical chirality in the time of Lewis Carroll, his work Through the Looking-glass contains a prescient reference to the differing biological activities of enantiomeric drugs: "Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn't good to drink," Alice said to her cat. A supplemental story to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen made reference to this, mentioning in passing that after her return from the mirror world, her body was mirror-flipped, presumably down to the molecular level, as she was unable to digest food afterwards.

In Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Technical Error" (also titled "The Reversed Man"), a technician working on a giant superconducting generator is accidentally "inverted" into his mirror image, right down to the coins in his pocket. When he is found to be starving despite an apparently-healthy diet, the culprit is determined to be the amino acids in his food, which are natural amino acids and opposite in chirality to those his body now requires.

Isaac Asimov's short story "Left to Right" concerns an unknown "change in parity", and mentions biological incompatibilities due to chirality as one possible consequence.

In Dorothy L. Sayers's novel The Documents in the Case, a murder is committed that is designed to appear as accidental death from eating poisonous mushrooms containing muscarine. The case is proved to be murder because the muscarine found in the deceased's stomach is racemic and therefore synthetic.

In James Blish's Star Trek novella Spock Must Die!, Spock's mirror-duplicate is later discovered to have stolen chemical reagents from the medical bay to convert certain amino acids to opposite-chirality isomers that his metabolism requires.

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