“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.”

Freya Stark.





Treatment of diseases by natural drugs, especially those from herbs, goes back to the dawn of history. Indian system of Ayurveda is as old as mankind itself and it has more than one thousand five hundred herbal drugs in its fold. It was mainly experience, which we despise now, that gave our ancestors in modern medicine the idea of these herbal drugs. Paracelsus had proclaimed specific remedies for specific diseases. It was Sydenham who had hoped that one day there would be a specific remedy for every disease on the lines of Peruvian bark for malaria. That day is yet to come!



Serendipity gave new medications from time to time and it was the accidental discovery of the willow bark by Reverend Edmund Stone which was the beginning of the long saga of the discovery of one of the most enigmatic drugs in modern medicine, the only one used for an array of diseases ranging from common cold to cancer, that magic bullet, aspirin.



Two Italians found out the active ingredient in the willow bark, salicin in the year 1826. Three years later a French chemist obtained its pure form. A well-known folk medicine in Sweden, which was a good pain reliever, was meadowsweet (spirea ulmaria). A Swiss pharmacist Johann Pagenstecher was the one who extracted a substance from this meadowsweet, which later prompted a German chemist Karl Jacob Lowig (1803-1890) to obtain an acid from this, salicylic acid.



Later it was a Montpellier chemistry professor, Karl Friederich Gerhardt, in the year 1853 who tried in vain to remove the most annoying side effect of this acid-the gastric irritation. But the real acetyl salicylic acid, the painkiller, analgesic, antipyretic substance was developed by Felix Hoffman (1868-1946). The name aspirin was invented in the year 1899. In the year 1900 to be precise that the German company Bayer took out patents on this drug and made it their best selling product for all times to come. It is estimated that in the US alone more than 10,000 tons of it is used annually.



So far we have the chronological history of this wonder drug. History should not only be the recording of the dates but should look carefully into all the aspects. Here is a good story of human effort, human tragedy, and the drama enacted by the powers-that-be at the time. Research into this drug's origin led Prof. Walter Sneader of the Strathclyde University in Glasgow to find out the whole truth about this.



In fact, the man who developed the drug aspirin was not Felix Hoffman, as is noted in the books, but his boss at that time, Dr. Arthur Eichengrun of the German company Bayer in the year 1897. Nazis did not permit Dr. Eichengrun, a Jew, to present his data to the scientific community and was confined in the concentration camp for two years. His German assistant Felix Hoffman was given all the credit and he was credited to have got the pure acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin. The company, of course, made a fortune selling this drug.



It wasn't until after the war in 1949 that the then elderly Eichengrun made his claim to discovery, but died within a few days of this and the world naturally forgot him totally. Hoffman claimed that he discovered the drug in 1934 at the height of Nazi rule in Germany. Eichengrun, the then owner of Bayer Company, was being removed from his position and the company was taken over by the Nazis, who imprisoned Eichengrun in the concentration camp.



Dr. Sneader did a lot of detective work and eventually caught hold of the laboratory log book maintained by Eichengrun and that showed clearly that Felix Hoffman who worked as the lab.assistant only helped Eichengrun in the laboratory, but the credit for the discovery should completely go to Eichengrun. Felix Hoffman later on in the year 1932 tried to get another more palatable compound out of aspirin, using the lab. Methods developed by his former boss, Eichengrun, without much success. He, therefore, published his boss's work as his own in 1934!



That much for the truth in science. These data were presented to the Royal Society of Chemistry's annual meeting in Edinburgh recently. It is interesting to note that Eichengrun was responsible for many other chemical compounds but their credit went to many other Nazi chemists who worked with him. Man, said Shakespeare: " whether in palace or pad; cottage or castle is governed by the same emotions and passions." How true!



In conclusion we could learn two lessons here. One is that all that appears in print need not be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The second is more important and that is that any western opinion which, in India, is taken as Gospel truth may have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Lastly in Science, as in any other field of human endeavour, truth is the casualty many times. True education is the training for man " to act justly, skillfully, and magnanimously under all circumstances of war and peace." How many of us are educated? It is not prudent to equate education with literacy or even, for that matter, with degrees. Truth and ethics alone could run this world. Curiosity is science and organizing it is called research. Let education foster this spirit in our students.



" The course of human history is determined, not by what happens

in the skies, but what takes place in our hearts."

Sir Arthur Keith.