Ryoji Noyori Quotes

Enantiomers often smell and taste differently.

We're finally moving out of the realm of solely discussing biology in regards to a drug-based world.

Are the atoms of the dextroacid (tartaric) grouped in the spirals of a right-hand helix or situated at the angles of an irregular tetrahedron, or arranged in such or such particular unsymmetrical fashion? We are unable to reply to these questions. But there can be no reason for doubting that the grouping of the atoms has an unsymmetrical arrangement with a non-superimposable image. It is not less certain that the atoms of the laevo-acid realize precisely an unsymmetrical arrangement of the inverse of the above.

Well, in pharmacology, if the effect is local, it's of course absolutely awkward to use it in any other way than as a local treatment.

An object is chiral if it cannot be brought into congruence with its mirror image by translation and rotation.

By 1954, as an assistant professor with a group of three graduate students, I was able to initiate more complex experimental projects, dealing with the structure, stereochemistry and synthesis of natural products. As a result of the success of this research, I was appointed in 1956, at age twenty-seven, as professor of chemistry.

In research, I wanted to establish the medicinal chemistry/bioassay conjugation as an academic pursuit, as exciting to the imagination as astrophysics or molecular biology.

To grasp the essence of chirality, it is instructive to withdraw for a moment from the familiar three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional one, into a plane, and enquire what chirality means there.

Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?

Medicine is so fascinating.

Anybody that thought the genome was going to directly provide drugs was a fool. Biological networks are not simple, and making drugs to affect them won't be simple.

Many transition states have a well-defined preferred geometrical requirement.

In 1967, I had formed a collaboration with Hermann Eggerer, then of Muenchen, and together, we solved the problem of the 'asymmetric methyl group' and applied the solution in some of the many ways that have proved possible.

The essential principles of the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules had been correctly formulated by the first Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Jacobus van't Hoff, as early as 1874.

I really was inspired by the possibility of more directly being involved in the development of drugs myself.

My choice of learning pharmacy was driven by my interests, curiosity, and a desire to seek new medicines for patients.

The artificial products do not have any molecular dissymmetry; and I could not indicate the existence of a more profound separation between the products born under the influence of life and all the others.

The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak.

I'm not a drug user myself. I'm too little to take drugs - my body can't take it.

That's all we had when I was a kid: Robitussin. No matter what you got, Robitussin better handle it. "Daddy, I got asthma." "Robitussin." "I got cancer." "Robitussin." "I broke my leg." Daddy poured Robitussin on it. "Yeah, boy, let that 'tussin get in there. Yeah, boy, let that 'tussin get on down to the bone. The 'tussin ought to straighten out the bone."

From a chemist's point of view, the surface or interior of a star…is boring—there are no molecules there.

There are many ways of communicating. Some hold the theory that new forms of communication between people can be obtained through hallucinogenic drugs.

Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.

You want to know the truth about drugs? You can only go one or two ways. You can go up, or you can go down. That's it. After a certain point, though, no matter what you do, what you take, you don't go anywhere, and that's when you've got to sit down and face yourself.

Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them.