Word: merck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Antibiotics. After the sulfas came the antibiotics. No drug was ever launched with more drama than the first and greatest of these-penicillin. As the story is usually told in the drug trade, Merck & Co. missed out on penicillin in the early stages because it concentrated too hard on trying to find a way to synthesize it and got left behind. George Merck explains it differently: "The Government asked us to put up a plant, but insisted that Merck apply for Government money to finance it. I said 'No, that would make it look as if we were lobbying...
Other companies did, and got into penicillin faster. But Merck got a head start with the next antibiotic, streptomycin. When Rutgers' Dr. Selman Waksman found that his beloved soil bacteria had made something that killed many germs which penicillin did not affect, he took the culture to Rahway. Though half a dozen companies are making streptomycin today, the best guess is that Merck microbes, in their own temple of vats at Elkton, Va., make 40% of the U.S. output...
...cortisone. In 1935, a biochemist at the Mayo Clinic, Edward Calvin Kendall, had isolated a hormone similar to those produced by the adrenal glands. But its extraction was painfully complicated; in seven years Kendall could produce only 40 or 50 grams from 120 tons of adrenal glands of cattle. Merck chemists completed the synthesis Kendall had begun. Then Merck took on the job of producing enough of the hormone for physicians to test. Merck went all out in what Kendall calls "the most complicated chemical processes ever carried out in a commercial laboratory on a production scale...
...April 20, 1949, the Mayo Clinic's Dr. Philip Hench made his first report on the Merck product, and a new era in medicine opened. Kendall and Hench shared a Nobel Prize for their part in the work: for the first time in his long rheumatic history, man could practically eliminate the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis...
...demand for cortisone, as a treatment if not a cure, is already tremendous. In the DanviUe plant every few days (just how often is a Merck secret), chemical operators pour 1,500 lbs. of glistening white crystalline bile acid ($37,500 worth at quoted prices) into a 1,000-gallon still. In the still are hundreds of gallons of a solvent liquid with which the bile acid goes through its first reaction in its long, tedious process toward cortisone. Within hours this reaction is complete and a precipitant is added, causing Intermediate Compound No. 1 to separate from the solution...