Aspirin: The remarkable story of a wonder drug by Diarmuid Jeffreys, Bloomsbury, ÂŁ16.99, ISBN 0747570779
WHEN aspirin was first formulated by a chemist at the pharmaceutical company Bayer, the head of his laboratory judged: “The product has no value.” Now aspirin has been judged “the most thoroughly tested and most highly cost-effective of all remedies in clinical practice” – for its effect on vascular disease rather than its canonical status as a painkiller. In Aspirin, writer and TV producer Diarmuid Jeffreys traces this remarkable progress, probably one of the most fascinating stories in the whole of medicine.
First, though, the discovery. The story starts, of course, in prehistory with herbal remedies. The standard history of the development of the pure drug has it being formulated in 1897 by a junior technician, working in a laboratory run by a chemist called Bayer, whose father was unable to get a good night’s sleep because of arthritic pain.
Advertisement
But Jeffreys prefers the version told by Walter Sneader, a pharmacological historian from the University of Strathclyde in the UK. Sneader’s studies of the Bayer Company archives credit the crucial work to a Jewish chemist who, with the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, had to be written out of history. Jeffreys goes on to describe how the Nazis extorted cash from Bayer and thus profits from aspirin helped build up their regime, and Bayer chemists’ involvement in setting up the concentration camps and gas chambers. He goes on to record the battles over patent rights – interesting to those who follow that sort of thing – conflicts with medical ethics and liberties taken in advertising.
A new phase of the story opened with two discoveries in the early 1970s. John Vane and others determined that the drug’s painkilling effect was mediated through influence on the prostaglandins. Then my team at Cardiff reported a reduction in heart disease from low daily doses. Jeffreys gives delightful accounts of these, based on interviews of the researchers (including me).
The story has by no means ended. How aspirin’s influence over fever and programmed cell death (apoptosis) are mediated is still unknown. It is likely to have effects in cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, but these have not yet been adequately tested. Aspirin may well turn out to merit its description as “vitamin S” (51¶ŻÂţ, 7 February, p 36).
