Living forever
Elixir: A Story of Perfume, Science and the Search for the Secret of Life Basic Books, 320 pages, £20
The quest for rejuvenation has a tortuous history. Two thousand years ago, Maria the Jewess introduced distillation to produce an alchemical elixir of life, while WB Yeats later boasted that a vasectomy granted him a youthful surge of creativity. Napoleon swore by the regenerative virtues of perfume, diluted as a drink or to bathe in, and got through around 60 bottles a month.
Elixir: A Story of Perfume, Science and the Search for the Secret of Life is a detailed yet absorbing adventure story about the research, rivalries and rituals characterising 19th-century French chemistry. Deploying superb detection skills, academic Theresa Levitt has rescued from obscurity two friends, Edouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent, who searched for chemical order in living material – that is, the essence of life itself. Operating on the fringes of science, they worked secretly at night in a dilapidated laboratory at a Parisian perfume shop run by the Laugier family.
The back-room collaborators staggered from one depressing situation to another: on his 30th birthday, Laurent wrote despairingly: “I have wasted my life.” He had originally studied mining but, after successfully producing naphthalene, decided to investigate further. His insistence that organic substances have a crystalline structure proved controversial. Persevering, Laurent eventually persuaded scientist Louis Pasteur that his unusual findings were significant – and they led to Pasteur’s landmark demonstration that molecules can be right or left-handed. To his amazement, Pasteur discovered that as a result of these mirror-image molecules, substances created artificially behave differently from natural ones with the same chemical formula.
In 1953, Francis Crick proclaimed that untangling the molecular strands of the double helix had revealed “the secret of life”. As Elixir vividly explains, Crick was wrong: the intriguing puzzle of life’s crystalline asymmetry remains unresolved.