Bayer once sold heroin as a cough remedy, named for feeling heroic
From 1898 to 1910 Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as a supposedly non-addictive substitute for morphine, sold over the counter for coughs and even pneumonia. Its head of pharmacology wanted a simple name, so the company chose heroin, from the German word heroisch, meaning heroic. Bayer did not invent the drug, but it led the way in selling it.
Bayer started far from medicine. The dye salesman Friedrich Bayer and the master dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott founded it in 1863 in Barmen, now part of Wuppertal, to make dyes such as fuchsine from aniline. That same chemistry opened doors to drugs, and by 1899 its trademark Aspirin, a form of a willow-bark remedy first described by a French chemist in 1853, was registered worldwide. Who deserves credit remains disputed: Bayer names the assistant Felix Hoffmann, while the Jewish chemist Arthur Eichengrün, later imprisoned at Theresienstadt, said he led the work and coined the name.
War cost Bayer its most famous word. During the First World War its American and Canadian assets, including trademarks and the Bayer cross logo stamped on tablets since 1910, were seized and passed to Sterling Drug, and were not recovered until 1994. Because aspirin came into generic use, the name lost trademark protection in the United States, Britain and France, though Bayer still owns it in more than 80 countries. The firm also produced chemical weapons during that war.
Its record under the Nazis is grave. As part of the IG Farben conglomerate formed in 1925, Bayer belonged to an enterprise that used slave labour at Auschwitz, and a Bayer employee conducted medical experiments on camp inmates. After the war, the convicted war criminal Fritz ter Meer was released early and later chaired Bayer's supervisory board from 1956 to 1964. Chief executive Helge Wehmeier apologised publicly to Elie Wiesel in 1995.
Science kept coming alongside. Gerhard Domagk's team discovered prontosil, the first commercially available antibacterial drug, earning him a 1939 Nobel Prize that the Nazi government forced him to decline. In 2016 Bayer merged with Monsanto, a deal later dogged by litigation over the weedkiller Roundup.
Source: Bayer
