ABSTRACT
In the foreword to the 1994 reprint of Edwin Abbott’s classic eighteenth-century sciencefiction novel concerning a two-dimensional world, “Flatland,” Anjam Khursheed* comments, “Flatland will always be a profound inspiration to those who refuse to live in a world dominated by limited dimensionality.” Until relatively recently, pharmacology has been very much a limited-dimensionality science, the three-dimensional nature of drug molecules being largely neglected. Stereoselectivity in drug action has been known since the early years of the last century [1], but apart from a relatively few instances, it was overlooked in what was almost a golden age of drug discovery and development between the 1950s and the early 1970s. As a result of this neglect, by the late 1980s racemates accounted for 25% of the products available in a survey of 1675 drugs [2]. However, over the last 15 to 20 years there has been a change in philosophy with respect to chiral pharmaceuticals.
