In this video about aspirin we show you an old sample and make a new one.
Right this is a probably one of the oldest samples of aspirin company in existence today in the uk it’s one of the first samples ever made in england aspirin is a very common drug use for pain relief and anti inflammation and it’s very very old and very very effective this was given to me by my next-door neighbor professor jerry patton dunne who was the professor
Jesse b professor in nottingham and this is handed down through the decades from the original suggestively professor frederick kipping who made this sample in 1911 so here he is i got a picture of in the old guy actually we’re going to make a bit of aspirin because it’s one it’s actually the first molecule i ever made let’s get to the lab and crack on with it
Okay who’s helping me do aspirin james you wanna do aspirin someone do something okay i’ll do it i’ll start this is a salicylic acid this is a starting material and what we’re going to do is isolate it but then we’re going to use a compound called a reagent called acetic anhydride we’re going to add some to there then we’re going to microwave it just like we use a
Microwave to heat up your food we’re going to use a microwave to heat up our molecules take a syringe take some acetic anhydride and run it down the flask quite gently it’s going on to the salicylic acid and it’s five millilitres earned a sort of shake of that and i’m just going to put in a little bit of this phosphoric acid so this is clean i wouldn’t normally if
It wouldn’t have a second anything dirty now i’m gonna put a few drops and then it’s going to be a catalyst is it’s going to speed up the reaction to one two three four five one for good luck yeah why not so now we’re going to move over to our microwaves so now we’re going to put the flasks in the microwave chamber and sits an equity company put the lid back on 15
Minutes at seventy five ish degrees we’ve got to warm it up to get the reaction going so now we are it so heating up you can see it’s going from 23 it’s going up there quite quickly 20 30 degrees now so let’s go back to the office and we’ll talk about the background of aspirin well aspirins got very close links to nottingham and obviously we’re not in university
And you can see boots the chemists or pharmacist which is now one of the biggest chains in uk they manufacture aspirin let’s go back in time so let’s go to this molecule which is salicylic acid so what we have here is a benzene ring a carboxylic acid an acid group here an alcohol group here now this compound is actually derived from a compound from nature from a
Willow tree called salicin and when you ingest salicin it gets metabolized salicylic acid which is actually an anti-inflammatory itself okay so for many years people have been using willow trees or willow bark to treat inflammation and pain salicylic acid which is the precursor to aspirin when you saw me adding salicylic acid in the flask with the seating anhydride
So what we’re going to do the salicylic acid is put this group on it which is an acetal group and we’re going to stick it on here so we’re going to swap this hydrogen and put this on there so i’m going to do that and this is what’s happening in the microwave now we’ve taken an asset our group and capped it onto this oxygen now this is aspirin that’s the molecule
Bought in the body aspirin inhibits them just like the biosynthesis of prostaglandins it actually inhibits an enzyme it stops an enzyme from working so this sits in an enzyme and what it does it delivers this group that we just stuck on and the enzyme takes that group off and it can’t work anymore so it’s as isolated the enzyme stops it from working some molecules
Cause information and cause pain so if you can stop the manufacture of these molecules then it’s obviously very good you know it’s a good treatment and aspirin does that so the acyl group comes off year but also the remaining part of the salicylic acid this also sits in the enzyme and also stops it from working so there’s actually two ways so without the asset our
Group the salicylic acid will have an effect it will inhibit the enzyme or stop the enzyme from working but when you deliver this group as well it’s like two for one it’s a bonus so it was first made by a frenchman called a charles frederick gerhart in 1853 which is quite a long time ago but this was really just forgotten really until felix hoffman who’s a chemist
At bayer pharmaceuticals he became interested in a girl hearts work on aspirin and what he did he reproduce go had synthesis and then he went home to his dad he was suffering from having a headache or information no arthritis he he had and hoffman go zi dad have some of this he took it and hey presto it relieved me of is their symptoms and i hoffman thought great
Eureka moment again you know yet the the wiser he made the connection perhaps we can make money out of this wonder drug you know this new molecule and he went back to bayer convinced bayer to manufacture it and they patented it in 1900 and in bayer made an absolute fortune selling aspirin around the world and in england we were buying this drug from from germany
Even to treat our people then all sudden world war one breaks out we don’t become friends with you know we fall out of ur friends with germany and then the supply of aspirin of c stops so this is where professor kipping comes in and boots pharmaceuticals they decide to start manufacturing aspirin for themselves and obviously selling it to the allies this is why the
Plant was has started nothing in in beeston in 1915 the production – right and beginning a world war ron one really and boots pharmaceuticals made a quite a lot of money out of this and this is why nottingham university has a professor boot or suggestive boot professorship now which is the money was that given by boots to start this up and the actually the language
University of nottingham blonde was donated by suggesting boot so you know it’s we’re it actually tied into aspera in the history of nottingham is so that’s why i’m quite interested in this wonder drug how this molecule it change the world this group here which is one of the warheads so the aspirin is called an asset our group so a for asset i’ll spur spi a lot
Comes from the name of the willow plan which was comes from and in just happens to be a nice ending and it’s quite common the use of aspirin and that’s how the name came about okay so we’re ready to take it off the boil so you saw how it was it’s all dissolved now let’s take a single it looks like adds a clear oil i can smell vinegar that’s a good sign so like 20
Milliliters of water drop that down the side slowly now that what i’ll do is destroy the acetic anhydride its remaining then the stir a little bit over good mixing now what we’re trying to do is get the aspirin to crystallize out as a solid it might take a little bit of effort sometimes they haven’t straightaway not always we might have to heat it up one way to
Do it really well do a crystallization to keep the mixture very hot and then we cool it and during that process the aspirin should crystallize and give some really beautiful looking crystals you see any crystals off what i’ll do i’ll swirl it see if you can see like a snowstorm effect in there you see that yeah okay so sometimes to help speed up crystallization
If you scratch the inside of the flask sometimes it crashes out fingers crossed you see the whole the whole fuss getting filled with aspirin okay the aspirins crystallizing that just from scratching it so that’s inducing crystallization yeah it’s a is one of the things that makes chemists really happy in that when you see things out so when i scratch it you can
You’re actually forming a nice surface for the crystals to kind of aggregate on so it just goes like to grab on to really last i look at it and so you’re adding a swirl the flask pour the content into the filter funnel just hold it whoa see that you got some aspirin most quite a lot of it as a bottle of aspirin so here’s the sample at kings group made in 1911 and
Here’s a sample i just made in the lab 2010 almost 100 years between them and i go say kipping sample looks a lot better than mine despite it being a lot older there we have it side by side
Transcribed from video
Aspirin – Periodic Table of Videos By Periodic Videos