The Aspirin synthesis lab demonstrated to me how real healthcare innovations such as medicine are created. The creation of aspirin seemed like a very simple process. The process could be completed in about a half hour total. I was surprised by how well the process worked for everyone. The experiment was relatively safe except for the fumes and one of the chemicals.

It also helped provide some insight into what an application of the scientific process looks like for an actual scientist. In the example of the aspirin, the process would begin with the question or problem which is “how can we make salicylic acid not harmful to the stomach?” The next part of the process would be designing an experiment to answer this question. A hypothesis for this question would be “using acetic acid, we can turn the salicylic acid into a more helpful drug.”

Our class completed the experiment around 6 times total. I would imagine that when Aspirin was first created, they tested the experiment hundreds of times over to reproduce the results. The reproducibility of the experiment shows that the results are valid. I wonder how similar the current process of creating aspirin in factories is to the experiment that we did in class?