In 1899, Felix Hoffman was issued a U.S. patent for Aspirin. He
had successfully created a chemically pure and stable form of
acetylsalicylic acid in 1897. Aspirin is still used today to
fight pain and swelling. With understanding has come a second
renaissance for aspirin, whose storied history has come full
circle from ancient painkiller to legal leper, through
adventures on the Napoleonic high seas and in interbellum
Europe, and finally to a still-burgeoning set of new and
preventative uses. It accompanied astronauts to the moon and has
been mentioned in the “Guinness Book of World Records,” and the
20th century was even dubbed “the age of aspirin” by Spanish
philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. In 1971, Sir John Vane, then
working at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, uncovered
the mode of action of aspirin and related compounds, known as
NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). This achievement
ultimately garnered the scientist both the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine (1982) and a knightho