The Notebook

I

On 10 August 1897, in the laboratory notebook of a dye factory converted into a pharmaceutical one, somebody noted down a synthesis that had come out clean.

It was a short entry, with its date, its experiment number and the quantities; the kind of line written without thinking it will last. It was signed by Felix Hoffmann, twenty-nine years old, a chemist on the staff. The substance was acetylsalicylic acid, which was not new —it had been obtained before, badly and without interest— and which this time came out pure and stable.

A laboratory notebook looks like a historical document and is not. It is a company paper.

It is numbered, bound and kept by the company that pays the wages of the one who writes in it. Its function is not to leave a record for posterity either; it is to prove who invented what, on the day it has to be charged for or defended before a judge.

That notebook decided a history for a century.

II

The version that reached everybody has the shape of a tale and anybody knows it.

Hoffmann was looking for something for his father's rheumatism, who could not tolerate the salicylate he was being given; he tried acetylating it, it worked, he gave it to him and the father improved. It is a perfect story; it has a motive, it has affection and it has a good son.

It appeared in writing in 1934, in a note from the company itself, thirty-seven years after the events [neither Hoffmann nor anybody else had told it in writing before].

In 1934, in Germany. That fact is not an ornament of context.

Because the head of the pharmaceutical laboratory in 1897, the man above Hoffmann who ran that line of work, was called Arthur Eichengrün and was Jewish. In the 1934 version he does not appear. He does not appear diminished or disputed: he does not appear.

III

Eichengrün was not an assistant somebody forgets to cite.

He had joined the company in 1896 and made it real money with a treatment for gonorrhoea that sold for decades [that one did carry his name]. Afterwards he set up his own factory and patented materials used in cinema and in aviation. He was, by curriculum vitae, one of the important industrial chemists of his country.

In the thirties things were taken from him piece by piece: the company, the patents, the name on the papers. Each of those losses has its administrative file, its stamp and its official; none of this happened in the shadows. In May 1944, at seventy-six, he was deported to Theresienstadt, where he spent fourteen months.

He survived. He came back to Germany at seventy-seven, without a factory, without patents and with part of his family dead.

In December 1949, at eighty-two, he published in a German pharmaceutical journal an article titled “Fifty Years of Aspirin”. There he told his version of what had happened half a century earlier: that the synthesis was done under his direction and following his instruction, and that Hoffmann carried it out without knowing what it was for.

He died that same month, on 23 December, a few weeks after publishing it.

The company maintained its version.

IV

What I have in the bathroom cupboard costs less than two euros and is twenty tablets.

I took one in January, at eight in the morning, after one of those nights that no longer suit my age —and after a silly argument in a doorway at four—. Headache at the back of the neck. Thirst. That odd sensitivity to kitchen noises [the fridge, above all]. The tablet takes half an hour and what it does is clean and modest. It brings the pain down a step and leaves it there.

The next day I cut myself shaving, on the edge of the jaw: a cut of nothing, the kind you get every week.

It bled for twenty minutes. Two pieces of lavatory paper stuck on, the second soaking through again, and me at the mirror calculating whether I could leave the house like that [I had to go out]. It did not hurt, it was not serious, and it would not stop.

That was done by a tablet I had taken twenty-four hours earlier, and it was going to go on doing it for another eight days. A cheap painkiller [the cheapest there is] for a hangover, with effects that last longer than the hangover, than the pain and than the memory of having taken it.

V

Inside, this is what happens.

The tablet comes apart in the stomach, where the acid is so strong that the molecule never takes on an electrical charge, and being uncharged it crosses the wall without permission and without a transporter. Once in the blood it meets a narrow tunnel [an enzyme shaped like a channel] through which a certain fat has to pass in order to become two things at once, the pain signal and the order to plug a wound.

Aspirin does not obstruct that tunnel. It leaves a piece of itself inside.

A fragment comes off it and welds itself to the wall of the channel, halfway along, with a bond that does not come undone. For ever, in that particular tunnel.

Most cells resolve it without drama: they read the instruction they have stored, make a new tunnel and within a few hours are working again.

The platelet cannot.

A platelet is not a whole cell. It is a piece that breaks off a large cell in the marrow and goes out into the circulation with no nucleus, that is to say with no instructions, that is to say with no way of making anything new. It goes out into the street with the tools it has on it, and with none besides.

So the platelet that met my Tuesday tablet was left out of use, and not for a while: for the rest of its life, which is eight or ten days. The marrow releases new platelets every day, around ten per cent; that is why the effect comes undone slowly instead of ending.

Whoever takes an aspirin a day never has the same blood twice.

VI

What lies underneath this molecule is not a myth that grew on its own, like the ward that wakes up or the policeman's rose bush. It is another thing and it has to be called by its name.

A myth is manufactured by time and nobody is responsible [it is told wrong, it is repeated, and after thirty years it is already true]. This was written by somebody, in an office, with a date, and knowing what they were doing.

The record was not lost. It was edited. And it was not edited through administrative carelessness, but in the year and in the country in which a man was having first his patents taken from him, then his factory and then his name.

The archive was administered by one of the parties, and there was no other. The notebook was theirs, the 1934 note was theirs, the tale of the good son was theirs, and the other version had to wait for its author to come out of a camp, turn eighty-two and publish it in a journal, weeks before dying.

You do not need to decide who was right to see the imbalance. It is enough to look at who had the paper.

The paper, in this industry, is half the business. A patent is a document; a priority of invention is a document; the official history of a company is a brochure printed on its own press. Whoever keeps all three decides, for decades, what it was that happened, without needing to lie in any particular line.

VII

Against this there is an objection and it is serious, so I set it down whole.

Eichengrün is also an interested party. He was claiming an authorship that would have given him prestige and money, he did it fifty-two years after the events, when almost all the witnesses had died, and he did it from a biography that gives him all the moral right in the world but no documentary proof. His 1949 account cannot be verified any more than the 1897 entry. They are two assertions and no proof.

There is something worse, and it falls to me. It is very comfortable to tell this from here, with the man already dead, the company already marked and me with my two-euro tablet in the bathroom.

The only thing that seems firm to me is the small thing: two people said incompatible things, and one of them owned the notebook, the printing press and the building.

VIII

In the notebook the entry of 10 August 1897 is still there, with its number, its date and its signature. It is an authentic document. Nobody has falsified a line.

What is on no page is what was asked of that man that morning, who asked him and why [a notebook records results, not orders].

10 August 1897, laboratory entry with the clean synthesis.

1934, the company publishes its official version and in it a name is missing.

May 1944, Theresienstadt, fourteen months.

December 1949, the other version, published at eighty-two.

23 December 1949.

Box of twenty tablets, today, at any pharmacy: less than two euros.

Eight or ten days for each one.