Auguste Laurent began his work on morphine, nicotine, and other intoxicating alkaloids hopeful that he could reproduce them artificially from the byproducts of coal tar. After successfully creating artificial alkaloids, he collaborated with Jean-Baptiste Biot to determine that while plant-derived alkaloids were optically active, his artificial ones were not, further establishing a link between the action of molecules upon polarised light and their action upon the animal economy, and a firm line between natural and artificial products later taken up in the work of Louis Pasteur. This paper places this work in the context of a long tradition in which chemists, naturalists, and pharmacists variously used “active principles” to refer both to the particular living nature of substances, and to their ability to act on the human body.

奥古斯特·洛朗（Auguste Laurent）开始研究吗啡，尼古丁和其他令人陶醉的生物碱，希望他能从煤焦油的副产品中人工复制它们。在成功创建了人工生物碱之后，他与让·巴蒂斯特·比奥特（Jean-Baptiste Biot）合作确定，虽然植物生物碱具有光学活性，但他的人工生物碱却没有光学活性，从而进一步在分子对偏振光的作用与其对动物经济的作用之间建立了联系。 ，然后在路易·巴斯德（Louis Pasteur）的工作中确立了天然产品与人造产品之间的界限。本文将这项工作放在一个悠久的传统的背景下，在该传统中，化学家，博物学家和药剂师以各种不同的方式使用“活性成分”来指代物质的特殊生命性质以及它们对人体起作用的能力。