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Vitamins. In 1934, Merck's head of research, Dr. Randolph Major, got a call from Biochemist Robert Runnells Williams. Said Williams: "I've isolated a minute quantity of B1." Would Merck be interested in supplying him with more of the natural substance, helping to establish its molecular structure, and maybe trying to synthesize it?
Major was interested. For more than a year, tons of rice bran poured into one end of the Merck plant in Rahway and fractions of an ounce of B1 trickled out at the other end. Williams and the Merck-men tackled the job of synthesis, and in 1936 succeeded in making B1 easily and cheaply from simple organic compounds. Merck went into big-scale production. Result: medicine at last had a weapon to vanquish beriberi.
Suddenly the chemical woods were full of vitamins: vitamin A for healthy eyes; riboflavin (B2) and nicotinic acid (niacin) to prevent pellagra; ascorbic acid (vitamin C) to prevent scurvy. Merck produced all these and many more. In no time, U.S. drugstores were selling vitamins in all doses and combinations. The Government encouraged the makers of processed foods, from which vitamins have been taken out, to enrich them by putting the vitamins back. Merck now supplies tons of vitamins a year to enrich the nation's impoverished bread, margarine and breakfast cereals.
In the whole field of vitamins, Merck's greatest triumph, by far, is its most recent. Its chemists extracted the elusive anti-anemia factor from liver in pure form: the ruby-colored crystals of vitamin B12, essential to growth and the most powerful medicinal substance known in nature. One thirty-millionth of an ounce a day is enough for a healthy man's blood-making factory; one three-millionth checks pernicious anemia.
Sulfas. By the time the vitamin frontier was thickly settled, another frontier was being opened. In 1935 the French broke the secret of a new German drug and published it: a simple substance derived from coal tar would kill the streptococcus germs that often caused fatal infections. The drug was Prontosil; from it came sulfanilamide, first of the modern "wonder drugs" and first of a long line of sulfas. Other companies were the first to find high-powered, patentable variants like sulfamerazine, sulfadiazine, sulfathiazole and sulfaguanidine. Merck chemists got what looked like a dud: sul-faquinoxaline. Never proved safe for human use, it might have been shelved. Then animal tests showed that sulfaquinoxa-line is wonderful for protecting chickens against coccidiosis, a deadly parasitic disease. By now, the sulfas have been largely superseded by newer and better drugs (mainly antibiotics) for humans, but so far nobody has found anything better than Merck's sulfa for sick chicks.
Antibiotics. After the sulfas came the antibiotics. No drug was ever launched with more drama than the first and greatest of these—penicillin. As the story is usually told in the drug trade, Merck & Co. missed out on penicillin in the early stages because it concentrated too hard on trying to find a way to synthesize it and got left behind. George Merck explains it differently: "The Government asked us to put up a plant, but insisted that Merck apply for Government money to finance it. I said 'No, that would make it look as if we were lobbying. We won't do it.' "