Aspirin
“A pill for everything” is a long-standing dream of humanity. Modest aspirin has managed to approximate to this honorary title. Cold, pain in joints, cardiac infarction, thrombosis — aspirin comes in handy at very different ailments.
Long ago people paid attention to the fact that willow bark is good for fever; the reason of healing properties is a salt of salicylic acid contained in it. In1897, in a laboratory of a chemical concern Bayer a German chemist Felix Hoffmann (1868–1946) synthesized acetylsalicylic acid in its chemically pure and stable form. Hoffmann was trying to find an effective remedy for pain in joints his father suffered from. To the clinical practise the drug was first brought by a German physician Heinrich Dreser (1860–1924), Hofmann’s friend. The medicine was found rather effective, and on March 6th, 1899, the Imperial patent office in Berlin entered it in the trademark register with a number 36433 named “Aspirin”.
Until the beginning of 1970s, it was used as an anaesthetic, antipyretic and anti-inflammatory drug. Only in 1971 an English pharmacologist John Vane (1927–2004) clarified the mechanism of its action. As it turned out, it inhibits synthesis of biologically active substances — prostaglandins, which take active part in inflammatory reaction, temperature regulation, pain sensitivity and blood clotting. In 1982 John Vane and his Swedish colleagues Sune Bergström (1916–2004) and Bengt Samuelsson (born 1934) received the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
According to data of pharmacological department of the WHO (2005), aspirin and its analogues have been in the lead of 10 the most popular medicines for several years already. More than 45 million tonnes of the drug are sold annually all over the world.
In recent years scientists have found out that despite a considerable number of negative effects (impact on digestive apparatus, oedemas, asthmatic syndrome, increase of arterial pressure) daily use of aspirin in small dosage can prevent such serious diseases as myocardial infarction, stroke, thrombosis, and even colon and rectal cancer.
Vitamins
There is something barely noticeable and mysterious in our food, without which a person falls ill and finally dies. This “something” is vitamins.
In the second half of XIX century, they believed that nutritive value of food is determined by content of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, mineral salts and water. Meanwhile, centuries-old experience of long sea travels testify that even with enough supply of provisions you can die because of scurvy and infectious diseases. Why does it happen?
There was no answer, until in 1880, a Russian scientist Nikolay Lunin (1853–1937), who was studying the role of minerals in nutrition, noticed that mice which had an excellent dinner, which contained all known components of milk (casein, fat, sugar, salts), pined and died, while the animals, who were getting natural milk, looked healthy and active. The scientist supposed that milk contains some other irreplaceable substances.
16 years later, the reason of beriberi disease, widespread among people of Japan, Korea and Indonesia, who were eating refined rice, was found. A Dutch physician Christiaan Eijkman (1858–1930), who was working in prison hospital of Java, was given an idea by… chickens. They were fed with refined grain, and the birds suffered a disease, similar to beriberi. It needed only to replace rice with unrefined, brown one, and the disease disappeared.
The first to isolate the mysterious substance from rice husk in 1912 was a Polish biochemist Casimir Funk (1884–1967). After a number of experiments he concluded that chickens’ ailment was prevented by a simple nitrogen-containing substance — thiamine. A year later he called such irreplaceable substances “vitamins” by Latin words “vita” (“life”) and “aminum” (“amine”) — amine of life.
Nowadays we know about 20 vitamins, which are component parts of enzymes (water-soluble vitamins: C, PP, B vitamins and others) and cell membranes (fat-soluble vitamins: A, D, E and others), and take an active part in all processes of vital activity. Each of them is necessary to cure scurvy, rickets and other hypo- and avitaminoses, prophylaxis of numerous illnesses and rehabilitation of many people after serious diseases and surgical operations.