LEFT RIGHT AND WRONG

摘要

Checked your insides recently? They could be the wrong way round. No kidding. The chances are that at least 75 New Scientist readers are the mirror image of the rest of us, and they're probably none the wiser. Most of us don't give our internal body plans a second thought. You've probably been taught that your heart lies on the left-hand side of your chest, and if you've got a right-sided pain in your belly you start getting paranoid about your appendix. But for one in 8500 people, the exact opposite is true. It's as though they had stepped through a mirror into looking-glass land: the handedness and placing of their internal organs are completely reversed. It's a secret that many of them carry to the grave, because the reversal is so perfect they never even notice.