Aspirin for its health effects for at least 2,400 years. In 1853, chemist Charles Frédéric Gerhardt treated the medicine sodium salicylate with acetyl chloride to produce acetylsalicylic acid for the first time. For the next fifty years, other chemists established the chemical structure and came up with more efficient methods to make it. In 1897, scientists at the Bayer company began studying acetylsalicylic acid as a less-irritating replacement medication for common salicylate medicines. By 1899, Bayer had named it "Aspirin" and sold it around the world. Aspirin's popularity grew over the first half of the twentieth century leading to competition between
Neuraminic acid considerably: acetyl, lactyl, methyl, sulfate and phosphate groups have been found. The name "neuraminic acid" was introduced by German scientist E. Klenk in 1941, in reference to the brain lipids from which it was derived as a cleavage product. The symbol commonly used for neuraminic acid is Neu, and the residue is typically found with additional chemical modifications in biological systems. As a family, these residues are known as sialic acids. For example, "N"-acetylneuraminic acid, Neu5Ac, is typical in human glycoproteins. Among their many biological functions, these structures are substrates for neuraminidase enzymes which cleave neuraminic acid residues. Human flu