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Merck KGaA is a German based pharmaceutical company. Merck was founded in Germany and privately owned until going partly public in 1995. Following World War I, Merck lost possession of its foreign sites including the Merck & Co. subsidiary in the United States. Merck & Co., called Merck Sharp and Dohme (MSD) outside the USA and Canada, is now an independent company.

Merck KGaA (also referred to as “German Merck” or “Merck Darmstadt”) is one of the oldest still operating chemical-pharmaceutical companies in the world established in 1668. The German based pharmaceutical company operates mainly in Europe. It operates under the umbrella brand EMD in North America, formed from the initials of Emanuel Merck, Darmstadt.

History

Merck has a colorful and varied history. The roots of Merck reach back into the 17th Century. In 1668, Friedrich Jacob Merck, an apothecary, assumed ownership of the "Engel-Apotheke" (Angel Pharmacy) in Darmstadt, Germany.

In 1816, Emanuel Merck took over the pharmacy. Thanks to his good scientific education he was successful in isolating and characterizing alkaloids in the pharmacy laboratory. He began the manufactuire of these substances "in bulk" in 1827, touting them as a "Cabinet of Pharmaceutical and Chemical Innovations". He and his successors gradually built up a chemical-pharmaceutical factory that produced — in addition to raw materials for pharmaceutical preparations — a multitude of other chemicals and (from 1890) medicines.

In 1891, George Merck established himself in the United States and set up Merck & Co. in New York, USA. Merck & Co. was confiscated following the First World War and set up as an independent company in the United States. Today, the US company has about 70,000 employees in 120 countries and 31 factories worldwide. It is one of the top 5 pharmaceutical companies worldwide, much larger than its German ancestor, which employees around 28,600 people in 54 countries.

On March 13, 2006, Merck announced a hostile takeover bid for Schering, the World's largest producer of oral contraceptives.

Drug Discoveries

Many popular and successful products have emerged from Merck's laboratories. After Wilhelm Adam Sertürner's isolation of morphine from opium in 1805, Merck pioneered (from 1827) the commercial manufacture of morphine for an expanding global market. From 1884 onwards, Merck played a vigorous role too in the production and marketing of cocaine. Sigmund Freud, author of Über Coca (1884), was an enthusiastic collaborator in Merck's coca research, though the methodological sophistication of his self-experimentation studies has been challenged.

Around World War I, Merck systematically patented many drugs including MDMA (ecstasy) and several of it's analogues, though no uses for them were given. Attention was directed at vitamins as a new product category, and Vigantol was introduced in 1927, followed by Cebion in 1934.

Following the defeat of Germany in World War II, Merck was granted permission by the military government to produce drugs, pesticides, food preservatives, reagents, and fine chemicals for laboratory use. Soon afterwards the boom commonly known as the "Wirtschaftswunder" (economic miracle) set in. For Merck this meant two-digit sales-growth figures for many years. Successful pharmaceutical agents of this time included corticoid preparations — for example Fortecortin, which is still used today —, the cold remedy Nasivin or the hormone preparations Gestafortin and Menova. In the chemical-research sector, work started on pearl-lustre pigments in 1957, while the company's involvement in liquid crystals was initiated ten years later leading to its market leading role today. In the area of analytical chemistry, Merck played a leading role in the development of chromatographic methods.

External links

• About Merck KGaA
• Discover Merck KGaA
• The early history of Ecstasy: Merck and MDMA
• About Merck & Co.
• EMD Chemicals, Merck's North American Affiliate

• Current events
• Pharmaceutical companies