Who Invented Aspirin?
The earliest documented use of a salicylate analgesic is credited to Hippocrates, the 5th century BC Greek physician, who used a bitter willow bark powder (containing salicylic acid) to treat aches and pains. Most likely willow bark had been used for hundreds of years before Hippocrates' time, but no one knows for sure.
Pharmaceutical industry historians generally credit Edmund Stone, an 18th-century Anglican cleric, with discovering the pain-killing properties of willow bark. Modern theory holds that the willow produces salicylic acid as a means of chemical defense against infection. During the 1800s sodium salicylate came into routine use as both an analgesic and antipyretic (fever-lowering agent).
"Naked" salicylate, however, is very rough on the stomach—it is, after all, an oily carboxylic acid and a charge-stabilized phenol (which makes the phenol even more acidic, and more irritating in its base form). A chemist at Bayer discovered in the 1890s that capping the phenol with an acetyl group renders the drug if not palatable, at least tolerable by most individuals. (Anti-aspirin zealots claim that even with the modification, aspirin would not pass FDA review today).
The Bayer chemist's superiors named the new drug (acetylsalicylic acid) aspirin. Curiously, they were not too optimistic about its future because they believed it would weaken the heart. Today we know that aspirin knocks out specific cyclooxygenase enzymes that generate pain-causing inflammatory prostaglandins, which rather than harming the heart, protects it from damage after a heart attack. Today Americans pop about 80 billion aspirin tablets each year. More than 50 nonprescription drugs contain aspirin as a principal active ingredient, and a large (but shrinking) number of prescription analgesics also contain aspirin.
Check almost any history of aspirin and you'll read that the German scientist who discovered aspirin was Felix Hoffman. Now Greg Aharonian reports in his Internet Patent News Service that, according to University of Glasgow Pharmaceutical Sciences professor Walter Sneader, aspirin was not invented by Hoffman but by Hoffman's boss, Arthur Eichengruen.
"Who cares?" would be a reasonable response. Managers routinely take credit for their groups' discoveries. Here we have just the opposite: a superior who gave credit to an underling. Except, as Sneader points out, that Eichengruen was Jewish. According to Sneader, Bayer fabricated the story of Hoffman's accomplishment decades after the fact, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, "so Germans would not have to learn that the most successful drug in history was discovered by a Jew." Bayer denies Sneader's assertions, sticking to its claim that Hoffman discovered aspirin.
Sneader unveiled his research at the annual conference of the Royal Society of Chemists in Edinburgh, and has written two books on the modern history of drugs.
For more information: Greg Aharonian, Publisher/Editor, Internet Patent News Service, P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA, 02178. Tel: 415-981-0441.
By Angelo DePalma