Talk:Felix Hoffmann

Insult
I found this article an insult to Felix Hoffman. Please go back and check your facts. First off, Felix was my Great-Great Grandfather, through adoption of his sister's (my Paternal Great great Grandmother)son upon her death, and my Great Great Uncle as well. My Grandmother knew him and spoke of him. His legacy is part of our family history. First off, Felix's father suffered terribly from Arthritis, which still runs among some members of my family today. The father was in terrible pain and a big part of the motivation for Felix's research was to aid in the relief of his father's suffering. Prior to FELIX's synthesis of a more useable form of Asprin, it tore up the stomach and was not pracical as a pain reliever due to those effects. Felix is the acknowledged inventor of the current form of Asprin, by the Bayer company, for whom he worked. He did not earn a dime over his regular salary as a chemist for his discoveries. It is very well possible that another chemist was working on the same challenge at the same time, but Felix is the man who got there first, because he worked tirelessly to end his father's suffering. The disrecpect of your article, in marginalizing a man's life work, from which we ALL benefit, and for which he was never duly compensated is callous at best. As for heroin, AGAIN, Felix was looking for ways to alleviate pain. He was a chemist developing drugs. He is not any more responsible for the deaths of people who abused those drugs the the inventor of the knife of the gun are responsible for deaths resulting from abuse of those items. Is Einstein responsible for the deaths of all the people killed by the bomb because he gave Leo Szlizard E=Mc2? Please reexamine your research out of respect for my Great Great Grandfather. Our family never saw any profit from his work. The least we can hang onto is some respect. — Preceding unsigned comment added by User: (talk • contribs)

Comment
"referred to by certain ex-drug addicts as one of the greatest mass murderers of all time, due to his invention of Heroin."

This seems very POV, as well as there being no sources, should it be removed?

Problems with this page
Only Aspirin is mentioned, before the article goes onto mentioning "both" Aspirin and Heroin. An earlier reference to heroin needs to be reinstated. Also, the dispute to whether Hoffmann only discovered Aspirin under the direction of Arthur Eichengrün needs to mentioned.Jason404 (talk) 06:51, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Status of controversy
The article says that "as of 2004" the controversy is still open. Given that it is now 2009, I was wondering A)If the controversy is still open and B)If the sentence in question can be amended.SpudHawg948 (talk) 22:49, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

POV lead
The article leads with POV content, then says "as of 2004 the controversy is still open". That's not the way to write things for Wikipedia. --70.48.231.5 (talk) 09:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Status controversy
When the controversy is mentioned, it should be pointed out that Arhur Eichengrün's was fully credited by Bayer for over 50 patents and was in fact Hoffmann's superior at the company. These facts weaken his argument that his "discovery" of Aspirin was not credited because of anti-semitism just in the particular case of Aspirin. --Count Westwest (talk) 01:17, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I worked for six years as a synthetic organic chemist in the United States. From my experience this is typical of the way all such firms have worked world-wide forever. I did my work under conditions identical to those described here. I had a supervisor who told me, with more or less detail, what to make. Sometimes he gave me written out reaction instructions. Sometimes he simply gave me a target molecule and let me design the reaction scheme. The patent rule in place at that time required that the person directing me write, in ink, into a sewn together notebook, their conception of the synthesis. Then I had to write, in my sewn together notebook, what I did when I first made the compound. If there was no conception documented before I did the work, then under United States law I was the inventor. No amount of discussion would change that. This is splitting hairs. Those who have done synthetic organic chemistry know that telling someone what to do, is not doing it. No matter how detailed the instructions, the work at the bench is "inventive". I did literally hundreds of chemical reactions following the detailed instruction in the literature, and not one of them produced the yield nor sometimes even the product claimed. In every case without exception I had to use my experience and synthetic skill to modify what they did to get their claimed yields. Nick Beeson (talk) 13:30, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

Moved here
I am a chemist and I do not know what this passage means, is it referring to a free acid vs. a salt? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 16:17, 12 December 2012 (UTC) "Both substances had been synthesized earlier, but not in forms that could be used for medication. ASA had first been synthesized by Frenchman Charles Frédéric Gerhardt in 1853, and diacetylmorphine (that is, heroin) by C.R. Alder Wright, a British chemist in 1873."

Religion
What religion was Hoffmann?, if any at all? If no religion, what religion were his immediate ancestors. Thanks in advance to anybody who knows. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.105.33.20 (talk) 01:02, 3 August 2016 (UTC)