Aspirin isn't the only "wonder drug that works wonders" that Bayer made. The German pharmaceutical giant also introduced heroin to the world.
The company was looking for a cough suppressant that didn't have problematic side affects, mainly addiction, like morphine and codeine. And if it could relieve pain better than morphine that was a welcome bonus.
When one of Bayer's chemists approached the head of the pharmacological lab with ASA --- to be sold under the name "aspirin" --- he was waved away. The boss was more interested in something else the chemists had cooked diacetylmorphine. (This narcotic had been created in 1874 by a British chemist, who had never done anything with it.) Using the tradename "Heroin" --- because early testers said it made them feel heroisch (heroic) --- Bayer sold this popular drug by the truckload starting in 1898. Free samples were sent to thousands of doctors; studies appeared in medical journals. The Sunday Times of London noted: "By 1899, Bayer was producing about a ton of heroin a year, and exporting the drug to 23 countries," including the US Medicines containing smack were available over-the-counter at drug stores, just as aspirin is today. The American Medical Association gave heroin its stamp of approval in 1907.
But reports of addiction, which had already started appearing in 1899, turned into a torrent after several years. Bayer had wisely released aspirin the year after heroin, and this new non-addictive painkiller and anti-inflammatory was well on its way to becoming the most popular drug ever. In 1913, Bayer got out of the heroin business.
Not that the company has kept its nose clean since then:
A division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs --- medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS --- to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980s while selling a new, safer product in the West, according to documents obtained by The New York Times...[l] Hong Kong and Taiwan alone, more than 100 hemophiliacs got HIV after using Cutter's old medicine, according to records and interviews. Many have since died.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Aristotle Set Back Science For Around 2,000 Years
Aristotle may have been a genius when it came to philosophy---especially logic---but he didn't know squat about science. Sure, we can't excel in every field we try our hand in, but Aristotle's massive errors aren't just a personal embarrassment to him---they directly hampered scientific progress for 1,800 to 2,000 years.
The problem is that from the time he was alive (the fourth century BC) until the Enlightenment, when Aristotle said something, that was the end of the argument. Isaac Asimov notes, perhaps with a tinge of jealousy: "No matter who disagreed with them, even other philosophers, Aristotle's ideas --- whether right or wrong --- usually won out." Chemist John Appeldoorn writes that "Aristotle's teachings were unquestioned. After eighteen centuries accepted them as if they had been written in stone.
For example, Aristotle didn't believe that plants were divided into male and female sexes, so there the matter stood for two millennia, until botanists stated the obvious in the 1700s.
He was also wrong about inertia, and again the world had to wait --- this time for Galileo, followed by Newton --- to speak the truth that objects in motion stay in motion, while objects at rest stay at rest, unless acted upon by outside forces.
Like most Greeks, Aristotle championed the view that the Sun and planets revolved around the Earth. Copernicus (in the early 1500s) and Galileo (100 years later) had to risk their reputations and their lives to put the kibosh on that nonsense.
He further surmised that outer space was made up of 54 spheres and that there were only seven heavenly bodies, which were fixed and unchanging. This meant, for one thing, that comets had to be in Earth's atmosphere. Only in 1577 was this notion put out to pasture. Over the next 50 years, belief in the heavenly spheres faded.
Aristotle declared that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, an error that could've been exposed with simple experiments. It wasn't until 1,900 years later that Galileo dropped objects off the Tower of Pisa, proving that all things obey gravity at the same rate. By that time, Galileo already had been kicked out of the University of Pisa for daring to question Aristotle's theory.
Some Greeks, including Democritus and Hippocrates, surmised that the brain was the seat of thought, intelligence, and emotion. Tish tosh, said Aristotle, it's the heart --- and that became the accepted wisdom. Aristotle wrote: "The brain is an organ of minor importance, perhaps necessary to cool the blood." Because Greek physicians primarily held brain-centered views, that remained a strong undercurrent, yet Aristotle's heart view dominated until the 1500s.
A fellow Greek philosopher, Democritus, postulated that the physical world was made up of tiny pieces of matter, which he called atoms. But Aristotle pooh-poohed this ridiculous notion, causing it to languish in obscurity until the second half of the 1600s, when scientists began to resurrect it. It wasn't until the first years of the 1800s that the existence of atoms was universally accepted.
Who knows how much further science would've progressed if Aristotle had stuck to syllogisms?
The problem is that from the time he was alive (the fourth century BC) until the Enlightenment, when Aristotle said something, that was the end of the argument. Isaac Asimov notes, perhaps with a tinge of jealousy: "No matter who disagreed with them, even other philosophers, Aristotle's ideas --- whether right or wrong --- usually won out." Chemist John Appeldoorn writes that "Aristotle's teachings were unquestioned. After eighteen centuries accepted them as if they had been written in stone.
For example, Aristotle didn't believe that plants were divided into male and female sexes, so there the matter stood for two millennia, until botanists stated the obvious in the 1700s.
He was also wrong about inertia, and again the world had to wait --- this time for Galileo, followed by Newton --- to speak the truth that objects in motion stay in motion, while objects at rest stay at rest, unless acted upon by outside forces.
Like most Greeks, Aristotle championed the view that the Sun and planets revolved around the Earth. Copernicus (in the early 1500s) and Galileo (100 years later) had to risk their reputations and their lives to put the kibosh on that nonsense.
He further surmised that outer space was made up of 54 spheres and that there were only seven heavenly bodies, which were fixed and unchanging. This meant, for one thing, that comets had to be in Earth's atmosphere. Only in 1577 was this notion put out to pasture. Over the next 50 years, belief in the heavenly spheres faded.
Aristotle declared that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, an error that could've been exposed with simple experiments. It wasn't until 1,900 years later that Galileo dropped objects off the Tower of Pisa, proving that all things obey gravity at the same rate. By that time, Galileo already had been kicked out of the University of Pisa for daring to question Aristotle's theory.
Some Greeks, including Democritus and Hippocrates, surmised that the brain was the seat of thought, intelligence, and emotion. Tish tosh, said Aristotle, it's the heart --- and that became the accepted wisdom. Aristotle wrote: "The brain is an organ of minor importance, perhaps necessary to cool the blood." Because Greek physicians primarily held brain-centered views, that remained a strong undercurrent, yet Aristotle's heart view dominated until the 1500s.
A fellow Greek philosopher, Democritus, postulated that the physical world was made up of tiny pieces of matter, which he called atoms. But Aristotle pooh-poohed this ridiculous notion, causing it to languish in obscurity until the second half of the 1600s, when scientists began to resurrect it. It wasn't until the first years of the 1800s that the existence of atoms was universally accepted.
Who knows how much further science would've progressed if Aristotle had stuck to syllogisms?
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