The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In 1897, a young chemist named Felix Hoffman, working for the German pharmaceutical company Bayer, found a way to synthesize a chemical variant of salicylic acid. The medicine was called aspirin, or ASA, short for acetyl salicylic acid. (The name was drawn from the a in acetyl, and spir from Spiraea ulmaria, the plant from which salicylic acid was extracted.) Hoffman’s synthesis of aspirin was a marvel of chemistry, but the pathway from molecule to medicine was tortuous. A senior executive at Bayer, Friedrich Dresser, suspicious of aspirin, almost stopped production, claiming that the drug had an “enfeebling” effect on the heart. He preferred concentrating on the development of another drug—heroin—as a cough syrup and pain reliever. But Hoffman persisted obstreperously with the production of aspirin, pushing the Bayer executives to the brink of firing him.