How aspirin turned hero - Heroin, Bayer and Heinrich Dreser

THE MAN in the 100-year-old photograph is not, to the modern eye, prepossessing. Balding, bespectacled and clerkish, he scarcely dominates his own portrait, let alone the picture of him with his staff in his laboratory.

Yet Heinrich Dreser, chemist and opportunist, was one of the most influential men of his age.

Between 1897 and 1914, Dreser worked for Bayer, the former dye factory that was to become the first of the world's pharmaceutical giants, in Wuppertal, north-west Germany.

Friedrich Engels was born there. While Dreser made less of a mark on history, you could argue he had the greater influence on the 20th century. As head of Bayer's pharmacological laboratory, he was responsible for the launch of two drugs that have shaped the way we live: aspirin, the world's most successful legal drug; and heroin, the most successful illegal one.

Aspirin, of which the world now consumes 40 billion tablets a year, was launched 100 years ago next February(13 September 1998). A fanfare of publicity will mark the centenary.

The centenary of heroin is more ambiguous: it was launched in November 1898 but was registered as a trademark in various countries from June that year, most lucratively in the US in August. But whenever the centenary falls, Bayer won't be celebrating.

This is understandable; but the stories of aspirin and heroin are intertwined, not least through Dreser.

http://opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html