Mike Musillo

Alice Bio Question

9/19/10

In Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Alice journeys into a

strange world. In this world, everything is backwards and doesn’t make sense. In this

instance, Alice stumbles upon milk and wonders whether it is safe to drink in this

backwards world. Since everything is backwards, the milk may be harmful to drink,

mainly because the biological structure could have changed. A reason as to how the

structure could be different is that the milk could be an enantiomer, one of the two sub-

types of stereoisomers. An enantiomer is a “mirror image” of a chemical structure, which

is the reason why the milk could be harmful. Simply because the structure of the milk is

backwards, there is a possibility that the milk can react very differently with the

compounds naturally inside your body, such as stomach acid for example. Enantiomers of

each other often show different chemical reactions with other substances that are also

enantiomers. In this case, everything is an enantiomer, so the reactions have a high

chance to be different and possibly dangerous. An explanation as to why the shape of the

structure matters is because then the molecules can bond with other molecules in

different ways, creating entirely different molecules with their own properties.