The German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG has been celebrating the 100th anniversary of its invention of Aspirin, feting the wonder drug in self-congratulatory ads. But the party mood faded last month when a Scottish chemist claimed to have new evidence that Aspirin's true inventor was lost to history because he was Jewish.
According to Bayer, staff chemist Felix Hoffmann was looking for a new painkiller to treat his father's rheumatism. He first synthesized acetylsalicylic acid in 1897, and Bayer began selling it in 1899 as Aspirin, a name Hoffmann suggested.
But Walter Sneader, a pharmaceutical scientist at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, told a 6 September meeting of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry in Edinburgh that old lab notebooks show that Hoffmann's work was directed by his boss, a Jewish chemist named Arthur Eichengrün. Sneader believes Eichengrün's role was covered up during the Nazi era and that the company never corrected the record. Eichengrün himself made a similar claim after the war.
Bayer spokesperson Hartmut Alsfasser says he is "personally hurt" by the charge and says Bayer's archives show that Hoffmann never worked under Eichengrün. He thinks Sneader may be confusing Hoffmann with one Fritz Hofman, who did work for Eichengrün. Case closed? Sneader doesn't think so: He aims to publish a detailed history supporting Eichengrün's claim.
