Miracle Drug

The amazing story of Aspirin:

Aspirin was treated as one of the valuable prizes to be divided up by the victors of WWI. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) required Bayer to give up its aspirin trademark in the U.S., Britain, France, and Russia as part of Germany’s war reparations. (Bayer’s U.S. holdings had previously been confiscated and sold to the Sterling Drug Company.) For the next 80 years, Bayer aspirin sold in America was not made by Bayer. It wasn’t until 1994 that the German company bought back the right to use its own name in the United States.
Bayer’s patent expired in the 1930’s and aspirin became a generic drug. Undeterred, Bayer cemented its brand leadership position between the two great wars by sending trucks across Europe with screens and loudspeakers to promote the benefits of Bayer Aspirin. For many thousands of people, the first “moving pictures” they ever saw were images of aspirin use.
In 1950, aspirin was first recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s best-selling painkiller.
In 1982 the mechanism of action for aspirin – then in use for 83 years – was confirmed as English scientist Professor Sir John Vane and two Swedish colleagues, Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson won the Nobel prize for discovering the role of aspirin in inhibiting prostaglandin production.
Aspirin turned 100 in 1999 with an estimated one trillion tablets having been consumed since its introduction.
The twentieth century was dubbed ‘the age of aspirin’ by Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on January 21st, 2007 at 6:11 am

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