The German Genius

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    The German word for cartel is Interessengemeinschaft , or IG. The cartel of the color industry, IG Farben, would create an infamous furor after World War I. 26
    F ROM D YES TO D RUGS
     
    Just as Werner Siemens was the best example of the link between theoretical and applied science in Germany in the nineteenth century, so Friedrich Bayer and Johann Friedrich Weskott were the best examples of the important move from dyes into pharmaceuticals. Bayer, from a family of silk weavers in Barmen, was born in 1825, an only son surrounded by five sisters. Weskott’s family had moved to Barmen because the Wupper River provided excellent water supplies for their bleaching business. Both men were ambitious and in 1863 agreed to mount a joint venture, Friedrich Bayer & Company. 27
    The business was a success, but it was only when the two founders died in the early 1880s and the reins were taken over by Carl Rumpff, Bayer’s son-in-law, that the firm’s direction began to change. Rumpff took Bayer public and with the capital raised he recruited a number of young chemistry graduates, one of whom was Carl Duisberg. Duisberg was charged with finding new areas where the company could expand. 28
    It so happened that in the mid-to-late 1880s a new substance had appeared on the market in Germany, called Antifebrine, and this would open up for Duisberg a whole new world.
    In 1886, two Strasbourg doctors, Arnold Cahn and Paul Hepp, had a patient who suffered from intestinal worms and they sent off an order to a local pharmacy for naphthalene, the standard treatment. At the pharmacy, however, there was a mix-up and without knowing it, the two doctors were sent a different substance entirely, a preparation called acetanilide. This, an acetylation of aniline, was yet another by-product of coal tar, well known in the dye industry, but very definitely not a medicine and in fact never given to human beings before. Only when Cahn and Hepp noticed that this “medicine” was having no effect on the patient’s worms did they begin to ask questions. And what they observed, among other things, was that their patient’s temperature had fallen noticeably. 29
    Paul Hepp’s brother, it so happened, was a chemist at a company called Kalle. By chance, Kalle manufactured acetanilide for the coal-dye industry and Cahn and Hepp approached them to see if the company would be interested in marketing acetanilide as an antipyretic. The Kalle directors liked the idea of an antipyretic, but they had a problem because the formula for acetanilide was well known: if their drug were successful, all their commercial rivals could join in the scramble for profits. That is when someone at Kalle had the bright idea to produce a simple, easy-to-remember name for the drug. Until then the drugs sold by pharmacists were invariably known by their complicated chemical names, even though most general practitioners were ignorant of the chemistry involved. The point about Antifebrine, as the Kalle drug was called, was that it was much much easier to remember than acetanilide, exactly the same substance. The clever part lay in the fact that, under German law, a doctor’s prescription had to be followed exactly: if the prescription specified Antifebrine, Antifebrine it had to be.
    Watching this, Duisberg reasoned that if it could be done once, it could be done again. He cast his eye over a substance called para-nitrophenol, a waste product of the dye industry, that was similar to acetanilide; Bayer had 30,000 kilos of it going begging. Could this be exploited? He asked one of his men, Oskar Hinsberg, to look into it—and within a matter of weeks Hinsberg isolated a substance called acetophenatedine that, if anything, was an even more powerful antipyretic than acetanilide, with fewer side effects. Duisberg called it Phenacetin and, says Diarmuid Jeffreys, the origins of today’s global pharmaceutical business “can be traced back to that moment.” 30
    Other successful drugs followed, so that when Rumpff died in 1890 and Duisberg took over, his first big decision was to create a separate pharmaceuticals division with a dedicated laboratory. Duisberg’s other clever move was to organize Bayer’s pharmaceuticals laboratory into two sections—the pharmaceuticals group, tasked with inventing new drugs, and the pharmacology group, which tested the drugs. This was a sensible form of quality control, much copied. 31 It was in this environment that there was produced the most