Felix Hoffmann Biography Inventor Aspirin

Felix Hoffmann (born January 21, 1868 in Ludwigsburg, 8 February 1946 in Switzerland) was a German chemist and pharmacist, who has synthesized during his tenure at Bayer aspirin in 1897, the stable and durable form. The substance was on 6 March 1899 under the name Aspirin approved as drugs.

Felix Hoffmann was after the synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) and the heroin head of pharmaceutical business division of Bayer, where he remained until his retirement 1928th.

Felix Hoffmann studied chemistry in Munich and from 1894 worked in pharmaceutical research facility of Bayer’s main plant in Elberfeld (now part of Wuppertal). Hoffmann synthesized on 10 August 1897 the first stable, medically useful acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). Became famous by the name of acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin, which is used by Bayer to market. Less well known is that Felix Hoffmann – only eleven days after the aspirin synthesis – heroin (diamorphine) synthetically produced.

Both substances were produced previously by chemical means, but not in a medically pure form. ASA was the first time by the Frenchman Charles Frederic Gerhardt in 1853, heroin first synthesized in 1873 by Charles Robert Alder Wright, a British chemist.

After being named Felix Hoffmann in several publications as the developer of aspirin, claimed the chemist Arthur Green Oak in a letter to the IG Colors (Bayer AG) in the last days of his detention and concentration camps in a 1949 paper published in the planning and coordination of aspirin and certain additives required and refers to the Hoffman’s executive staff as purely business. Arthur Green Oak, which only ten years was employed by Bayer, is one of the most important inventors of the Group’s history. More than 50 patents go back to the work of Arthur Green Oak and are well documented. Aspirin but not included.