The drug giant GSK traces part of its family tree to New Zealand baby milk
In 1904 a trading firm in Wellington started drying surplus milk from nearby dairy farms into baby food. It called the powder Glaxo, from a Greek word for milky. That modest product sits at one root of GSK, a British pharmaceutical group assembled from a century of mergers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Joseph Edward Nathan, a Londoner, founded his general trading company in Wellington in 1873. Its dried milk, first sold as Defiance, became Glaxo and was marketed with the slogan that it built bonnie babies. The firm's first medicine, vitamin D, followed in 1924, and Glaxo Laboratories was set up in London in 1935. The old Glaxo sign still survives on a car repair shop in the village of Bunnythorpe.
Other branches had equally humble starts. Thomas Beecham began selling his laxative pills in England in 1848. John K. Smith opened a Philadelphia pharmacy in 1830, the seed of Smith, Kline & French. Two American pharmacists, Henry Wellcome and Silas Burroughs, founded Burroughs Wellcome in London in 1880, where the Nobel laureates Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings later developed drugs such as mercaptopurine.
The pieces came together in stages. Glaxo and Wellcome merged in 1995 in what was then the biggest deal in British corporate history, and SmithKline Beckman had joined Beecham in 1989. Those two groups combined on 27 December 2000 to form GlaxoSmithKline, headquartered in London. In 2017 Emma Walmsley became its first female chief executive.
The company developed RTS,S, the first malaria vaccine, and several of its older medicines, including amoxicillin and zidovudine, are on the World Health Organization's essential medicines list. Its record also includes a guilty plea in 2012 over marketing drugs for unapproved uses, withholding safety data and paying doctors kickbacks in the United States, settled for US$3 billion, the largest pharmaceutical settlement to that point.
Source: GSK plc
