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.11 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.)
