After Shao Yuanyi finished breakfast, he said goodbye to his wife, and then rode to the dock. At this time, a small river steamboat carrying goods to Mucaoling was just about to return, and Shao Yuanyi took out an invitation letter from the Institute of Chemistry of the Academy of Natural Sciences, with which he could take any means of transportation in China to his destination for free. Sure enough, after reading his invitation, the captain respectfully let him into the cabin.

There were three other people sitting in the cabin, one of them was an officer, one was a businessman, and one was dressed in black skin, looking like an investigator of the Mei Agency. A Malay sailor carefully brought a pot of yerba mate and a few wooden cups before cautiously leaving. Shao Yuanyi glanced at it and found that there were usually some peanuts from South Africa that were served with yerba mate in the past, but now they have obviously been canceled. Damn war! Shao Yuanyi cursed, the peanuts are gone, but the ticket price has not dropped, fortunately I don't have to spend money.

Regarding the few passengers who traveled with him, Shao Yuanyi didn't say much to them very interestingly. After spending half a day in the rickety cabin, he woke up and suddenly found that he had arrived at the dock of Ping'an Harbor. After stretching hard, Shao Yuanyi lifted his handbag and strode onto the dock.

The wharf is full of steam cranes spitting black smoke, these powerful cranes lift heavy raw materials such as iron ore into the steam train cars parked at the dockside, and when several carriages are full, these low-horsepower locomotives start slowly, transporting several wagons of iron ore to the ironmaking workshop of Ping'an Iron and Steel Plant.

In addition to these trains carrying raw materials, there are also flatbed trains that pull various manufactured goods to the dockside. These manufactured products are all kinds of things. But most of them are bulky objects. Such as rails, artillery, steel armor, steam engines, boilers, machinery and other products.

Sometimes, there are also some ships carrying goods in Ping'an Port to the Ping'an Machine Qì Weaving Factory in the upper reaches of the Ping'an River, which is the largest factory in China in terms of earning power. Most of these ships are carrying food or fuel, but a few ships are carrying chemicals such as soda ash and dyes, which are important raw materials used in the textile process.

Over the years, with the development of the domestic chemical industry, especially after a considerable number of outstanding junior high school graduates entered the only high school in China, the senior high school affiliated to the Academy of Natural Sciences, for several years of systematic study, great progress has been made in the field of inorganic and organic chemistry. Thanks to the only two chemistry teachers in the crowd (one working at the Institute of Chemistry of the Academy of Natural Sciences and the other teaching at the Corps Fort), the number of students studying chemistry in China has finally reached a high number in the past two years. The total number of students studying this knowledge in the affiliated middle school and the Corps Fort has reached more than 120 people.

Most of these students were assigned to the role of senior technicians in several enterprises such as the North Chemical Factory, the North Pharmaceutical Factory, the North Arsenal, the Coking Plant, the Dye Factory, and the Ping An Iron and Steel Plant. After a few years of training, their current performance is quite so-so, which makes the traversers greatly relieved, because it means that they have a successor to their career.

Among the various categories of the chemical industry on the east coast, it seems that the achievements in the field of coal chemical industry are still greater. The research on the various components in coal tar has entered a very detailed process, especially in the dye industry, where the continuous experiments and permutations are combined. The East Coast people have now made dozens of colors of dyes, which makes the advantages of East Coast textiles in the high-end field (dyed cloth, calico) more and more consolidated. If it weren't for some important intermediate chemicals, such as potassium dichromate, strong oxidants that would not have been able to be produced on a large scale so far. The dye industry on the East Coast can really grow tremendously, and its output can be multiplied at least dozens of times, completely monopolizing the entire textile market - well, this does not seem to be a good thing for the people of the East Coast.

In addition to dyes, there is also a large amount of coal tar gas and asphalt that can be used from the coking plant, and in addition, two former middle school students also took several "students" to successfully produce acetic acid (acetic acid) through calcium hydroxide and sulfuric acid, which can be regarded as further expanding the utilization rate of coal tar.

However, this time, the Institute of Chemistry of the Academy of Natural Sciences invited Shao Yuanyi to come to Ping'an County (where the Institute of Chemistry is located), not for coal tar, dyes and other nonsense, but because their organic chemistry department finally succeeded in restoring a gadget after years of research and practice - a drug called aspirin. Many doctors, including Shao Yuanyi, who have a certain status and reputation in China, have been summoned to the Ping'an County Institute of Chemistry, where they will each be given some aspirin, and then brought back to the patients to take and record the various conditions in detail, and finally feedback to the people at the Institute of Chemistry. After the final confirmation that there is no problem, the aspirin can be handed over to the northern pharmaceutical factory for production.

It is said that since ten years ago, when Wang Liao, the only genuine doctor in Zhongli, suddenly asked whether he could try to restore aspirin, a classic drug, the Ministry of Health began to cooperate with the Institute of Chemistry to conduct research. It's just that at the beginning, this kind of research was very slow in the absence of people, materials, and data, and what was even more amazing was that Wang Liao, a person who mentioned yì, only had a vague understanding of the general process of aspirin production in modern drug production. As for the original origin of this drug, this guy doesn't know if he didn't listen carefully or what, but he only roughly knows that it is a synthetic drug that is an important ingredient extracted from willow bark, salicin, and then with acetic acid or something.

Fortunately, Song Qiang, a high school chemistry teacher, took time out of his busy schedule to recall what he had learned about aspirin. It's just that when he taught his students to make real yàn, they were all ready-made raw materials such as salicylic acid and acetic anhydride, and it was quite difficult to find out how these raw materials came from. Because the production of modern drugs, including raw materials, is basically synthetic, but the crossing of the public obviously does not have these conditions, then it has become an inevitable choice to find alternatives from nature, and at this time, the willow bark mentioned by Wang Liao, a half-hung doctor, has entered everyone's eyes.

The process of synthesizing salicylic acid was finally successful after numerous failed trials. First of all, at the beginning, we lacked qualified glass test vessels, and later after the quality of the test utensils of Henan Glass Factory was qualified, we began to study the eight classics, which has wasted a year or two. Next, it took a lot of time to isolate, identify, and purify salicin from willow bark, and then there was the problem of how to hydrolyze and oxidize salicylin into salicylic acid, which often a small detail can be stuck for months or even a year.

After successfully purifying salicylin from willow bark and then preparing salicylic acid, we began the long journey of preparing another important raw material, acetic anhydride, which is another painful process. We first prepared acetic acid (i.e., acetic acid) from coal tar, and then decomposed and dehydrated it at high temperature to form ketone.

After the ketone is prepared, it is then reacted with acetic acid under the catalysis of concentrated sulfuric acid to form acetylsalicylic acid, that is, aspirin. This process is easy to say, but it contains quite a lot of difficulties and points of attention, as long as you travel to any place, you may fail the experiment. Everyone's test records were piled up in a whole box, which shows the difficulty of the process.

The first samples of aspirin were finally made the year before last, which took more than six years. After the first batch of drugs came out, some Guarani people were asked to conduct human trials, and it was finally found that the effect of this drug was not very good. After that, it took more than two years to improve the drug preparation process, and during this time, we also continued to ask the Guarani people to conduct human trials, and in August this year, the drug finally reached a high level of efficacy.

At this time, people from the Institute of Chemistry and the Ministry of Health summoned Shao Yuanyi and other doctors to the hospital, so that they could bring back the drug prepared in the real room for long-term clinical trials to finally confirm its effect. If the response is good, then the northern pharmaceutical factories can start to tackle the technical problems needed for industrial production - in fact, they have already begun to do so.

Shao Yuanyi finally arrived at the Institute of Chemistry at noon, and after greeting several officials who knew him well with the Ministry of Health, Shao Yuanyi was led to the real room. A young high school student handed him a batch of drugs in a wooden box, explained the properties and uses of the drug in detail, and then asked him to take it back for clinical trials and document the process in detail.

And Shao Yuanyi naturally nodded yes to this. In fact, he himself was extremely interested in this drug, and the effect was so remarkable, and it could treat so many diseases, he really wanted to rush back immediately to find some patients to try. If it really works, this is a great merit, and it is also a money-absorbing weapon, and if it is sold openly, it may be more profitable than textiles.

Of course, it might be another disaster to sell openly, and it's hard to say. The tree is so popular, the people on the east coast are already so conspicuous, there are already so many ways to make money, if you can still make money by selling medicine, then don't you force the Europeans to rob you collectively.

After saying goodbye to the officials of the Ministry of Health, Shao Yuanyi hurried back to the dock and prepared to return to Mucaoling Township by boat. It's a war now, and there are still a lot of things to do at home, so we can't afford to wait outside for too long.

PS: Thank you for the inspiration provided by the bookfriend Egg Pain Fluffy. (To be continued......)