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Merck packages few drugs under its own name. But it supplies many other drug firms, which may simply package the Merck chemicals under their own labels or may use them in combination with their own products. So the chances are that any patient taking a prescription medicine today is getting something made, at least in part, by Merck. (Main exceptions: three patented antibiotics.) And more than likely, when he sits down to breakfast, he is also getting bacon from a hog that grew faster because of Merck vitamins and antibiotics in its feed, eggs from a hen protected against disease by a Merck sulfa, and bread enriched with vitamin BI made by Merck.
Pipes, Pipes, Pipes. The arsenal from which these new weapons come is as far removed from the apothecary's pestle and mortar as penicillin is from a medicine man's snake-oil elixir. In Merck's four producing plants in the U.S. (Rahway, N.J., Danville, Pa., Elkton, Va. and South San Francisco), almost 2,000 chemical operators perform their mysteries in a weird, surrealistic jungle assembled by welders, riveters and pipe fitters. Rising from the floor, which may cover an acre or more, are the great boles of the chemical forest: row on row of cylindrical stills and vats. Around and among them is a secondary growth of filters and crystallization tanks, their clusters broken by the stumps of centrifuges. Dangling like lianas from the upper branches are hundreds or thousands of pipes, from an inch to a foot in diameter, marked (usually at eye level) by a cluster of iron flowers—the handwheels of the valves. Everywhere there are pipes and more pipes. Like many another modern industry, the manufacture of the purest and most delicately constructed drugs takes place in a pipefitter's wonderland.
If the plant makes chemical synthetics, the air is charged with the warning smell of organic solvents. No one smokes, for these vapors can form highly explosive mixtures. Maintenance men must use non-sparking tools, and usually a plant guard stands by them with an explosimeter, watching the dial to see that the organic vapor is not strong enough to make an explosive mixture. At the other end of the production line, workers must use rubber gloves fitted into the front of glass-enclosed cubicles to package sterile chemicals under germ-killing rays of ultraviolet light.
In other plants, the work is done by microbes—billions of microscopic creatures, some found originally in the air (e.g., the mold which makes penicillin), some from the soil (for streptomycin and B12). Selectively bred, like racehorses or showdogs, they do their work in steel-and-concrete temples, down each side of which are rows of huge 15,000-gallon vats. The air is sickly sweet from the smell of the broth on which the microbes batten. It is vibrant with the roar of rotary agitators which keep the microbes whirling around in the vats (they work best this way). There is the whoosh of compressed air forced into the broth (though the microbes do not breathe, they would die without it).