Abstract
Acetaminophen is so familiar that its complexity often goes unnoticed. It sits in nearly every household, trusted as a safe pain reliever, and recommended even during pregnancy. Behind this familiarity, however, lie intertwined technical, regulatory, and cultural questions about what “safe” medicine means and who gets to define it. My two projects address these questions at different levels: one through the design of a sustainable chemical process for producing acetaminophen, and the other through a sociotechnical analysis of how pregnancy-related risk shaped the drug’s regulatory and public identity.
Our technical project proposes an alternative to the conventional petroleum-based acetaminophen synthesis. My Capstone team designed a continuous biorefinery process that converts lignin from oil palm empty fruit bunches in Malaysia into pharmaceutical-grade acetaminophen through depolymerization, a Hofmann rearrangement, acetylation, and crystallization. Modeled in Aspen Plus V14, the design achieves 93% crystallization recovery and 97% product purity at a projected capacity of 4.3 million kilograms per year. However, the economic analysis reveals the process is not currently viable: ammonia costs for lignin extraction drive operating expenses to roughly $6 billion annually against $1.5 billion in revenue. The team recommends exploring alternative solvents and pure lignin feedstocks to improve feasibility, demonstrating that even promising green chemistry pathways face significant economic barriers.
My STS research paper examines how acetaminophen’s reputation as the “safe” pregnancy analgesic emerged despite limited and contested evidence. Drawing on Langdon Winner’s Technological Politics framework, the analysis traces how regulatory structures, scientific interpretation, and cultural mediation together constructed this safety profile. After the thalidomide disaster, the FDA adopted exclusionary research policies that prevented pregnant women from participating in early clinical trials, creating persistent evidence gaps. Within this constrained system, acetaminophen’s lack of documented harm positioned it favorably against alternatives with explicit contraindications, meaning its safety emerged relationally rather than through direct validation. The paper further examines how contemporary scientific disagreement reflects competing standards of responsibility under uncertainty, and how political rhetoric and social media have fragmented authority over drug safety into a contested digital landscape.
Working on both projects revealed that technical and social questions around pharmaceuticals cannot be separated. The technical project showed that a biorefinery process can achieve high purity and yield, yet its adoption depends on economic viability and, ultimately, on public trust and regulatory transparency. The STS project showed that acetaminophen’s trusted status was shaped not by exhaustive clinical evidence but by institutional design and comparative positioning. Together, these projects demonstrate that building sustainable and trustworthy pharmaceutical systems requires attention to both chemical processes and the cultural, regulatory, and ethical frameworks that define what counts as safe.
