Felix Hoffmann
From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.
Felix Hoffmann (1868 - 1946) was a German chemist. He was born in Ludwigsburg and studied Chemistry in Munich. In 1894 he joined the Bayer pharmaceutical research facility in Elberfeld.
He is best known for having synthesized acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) on August 10, 1897 for the first time in a stable form usable for medical applications. Bayer marketed this substance as Aspirin. Less known is that only eleven days later, he synthesized for Bayer another famous substance, namely diacetylmorphine, which the company soon after marketed as a cough remedy and pain reliever under the name Heroin.
Both substances had been synthesized earlier, but not in forms that could be used for medication. ASA has first been synthesized by Frenchman Charles Frédéric Gerhardt in 1853, and diacetylmorphine (that is, Heroin) by C.R.A. Wright, a British chemist in 1873.
Shortly after these discoveries, he changed to the pharmaceutical marketing departement, where he stayed until his retirement in 1928.
See also
- Arthur Eichengrün, another chemist who had worked at Bayer in 1897 and who, in 1949, claimed that Aspirin was his invention, not Hoffmann's.
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