America seized Merck in World War I, and the family bought it back
Merck & Co. began in 1891 as the American outpost of a German drug firm founded in 1668. When the United States entered World War I, the government seized the German-held shares and sold them. In 1919 George F. Merck bought the company back at auction for $3.5 million, and it never rejoined its parent.
The German Merck business started when Friedrich Jacob Merck bought a Darmstadt pharmacy; by 1827 it was manufacturing morphine commercially. A long-serving employee, Theodore Weicker, opened the American arm in lower Manhattan with $200,000 from the parent, joined by George Merck, the founder's 23-year-old grandson. Since the split, Merck & Co. has owned the name in the United States and Canada and trades as MSD elsewhere, while the German company keeps it in the rest of the world, and the two have fought over it in court.
Its laboratories and funding lie behind a striking run of medicines. Streptomycin, the first effective tuberculosis drug, came from a Merck-funded programme at Rutgers in 1943, and at Selman Waksman's request Merck handed back its exclusive rights so several firms could make it. Merck chemists created the first thiazide diuretic, the first statin and the first carbapenem antibiotic. Maurice Hilleman developed the first mumps, rubella and combined MMR vaccines, and rubella-linked birth defects in the United States fell from as many as 10,000 a year to none. William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura developed ivermectin, first for animals and then against river blindness.
There were darker chapters. Its Australian arm paid Elsevier to publish what looked like an independent journal that mostly reprinted articles favourable to Merck, including praise for Vioxx, which Merck withdrew worldwide in 2005. A 2009 deal with Schering-Plough worth $41 billion was structured as a reverse merger to protect marketing rights to another drug. Between 2010 and 2015 it cut roughly 36,450 jobs.
Today it is headquartered in Rahway, New Jersey, and depends heavily on one product. In 2024 the cancer drug Keytruda brought in 46% of revenue, far more than the Gardasil vaccine or the whole animal health business.
Source: Merck & Co.
