Pause for thought

It seems rather strange to me to have a sub-topic covering just aspirin and penicillin as they would appear to have little in common – even the ‘Understandings’ and ‘Applications and skills’ in the Guide list them under different headings. In previous versions of the programme, aspirin, together with paracetamol and ibuprofen, formed a sub-topic on mild analgesics and penicillin was part of a separate sub-topic on antibacterials.

However they do have one rather quirky thing in common and that is that their history of discovery in both cases is controversial.

Most sources state that aspirin was discovered in 1897 by Felix Hoffmann who was working for the Bayer Company in Germany at the time. The story goes that Hoffmann’s father suffered from arthritis and encouraged his son to develop an alternative treatment to sodium salicylate. Sodium salicylate is the sodium salt of salicylic acid obtained from the willow tree bark. It had been used for centuries as a painkiller and for the treatment for fever, but has several unpleasant side effects, including nausea, gastro-intestinal irritation, tinnitus and liver damage. This story first appeared only as a footnote in 1934 in a history of chemical engineering written by Albrecht Schmidt. Schmidt was an employee of IG Farbenindustrie, which had amalgamated with the Bayer Company in 1925. It seems likely however that another scientist working at Bayer in 1897 really deserves the credit. In 1949 Arthur Eichengrün (1867 - 1949) claimed that the work had been done under his direction and analysis of relevant archival and published material appears to support this claim. The reason it was not accepted at the time is that Eichengrün was a Jew and Jews were persecuted in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In fact Eichengrün spent fourteen months in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Who discovered aspirin - Felix Hoffmann or Arthur Eichengrün?

Alexander Fleming is almost universally recognised as having made the serendipitous discovery of penicillin in 1928. Fleming was not able to stabilise the penicillin that he found and it was left to Florey and Chain during World War II to really develop it as an effective antibacterial. Fleming made his discovery while he was working at St Mary’s Hospital in London. One of the trustees of the hospital was Lord Beaverbrook who was a newspaper magnate and he used his power of the press to promote the story about Fleming. In fact the use of moulds to prevent infections has existed in folklore for a long time. In 1923 a Costa Rican, Clodomiro Picado Twight (1887 - 1944), working in Paris recorded the action of the fungal genus Penicillium sp. on the growth of bacteria, and his work was published in 1927, two years before Fleming published, but Clodomiro Twight has received little recognition outside of Costa Rica for his discovery.

Who discovered penicillin - Alexander Fleming or Clodomiro Picado Twight?