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Other companies did, and got into penicillin faster. But Merck got a head start with the next antibiotic, streptomycin. When Rutgers' Dr. Selman Waksman found that his beloved soil bacteria had made something that killed many germs which penicillin did not affect, he took the culture to Rahway. Though half a dozen companies are making streptomycin today, the best guess is that Merck microbes, in their own temple of vats at Elkton, Va., make 40% of the U.S. output.
Hormones. Then came cortisone. In 1935, a biochemist at the Mayo Clinic, Edward Calvin Kendall, had isolated a hormone similar to those produced by the adrenal glands. But its extraction was painfully complicated; in seven years Kendall could produce only 40 or 50 grams from 120 tons of adrenal glands of cattle. Merck chemists completed the synthesis Kendall had begun. Then Merck took on the job of producing enough of the hormone for physicians to test. Merck went all out in what Kendall calls "the most complicated chemical processes ever carried out in a commercial laboratory on a production scale."
On April 20, 1949, the Mayo Clinic's Dr. Philip Hench made his first report on the Merck product, and a new era in medicine opened. Kendall and Hench shared a Nobel Prize for their part in the work: for the first time in his long rheumatic history, man could practically eliminate the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.
The public, tirelessly hoping for a panacea, suffers an emotional letdown as each new wonder drug in turn proves to have its limitations. Cortisone, which was hailed at first (by laymen) as the cure for arthritis, is the latest exciting disappointment. Since the first chorus of enthusiasm, doctors have learned to handle cortisone warily. It cannot be given to any patients for more than a few weeks or months without the risk of causing other disorders. It will be years before the medical profession knows just how cortisone can best be used. But Merckmen know that cortisone, like its predecessors, is not a goal but a direction marker; they know the road is long, but they believe they are on the right road.
The demand for cortisone, as a treatment if not a cure, is already tremendous. In the DanviUe plant every few days (just how often is a Merck secret), chemical operators pour 1,500 lbs. of glistening white crystalline bile acid ($37,500 worth at quoted prices) into a 1,000-gallon still. In the still are hundreds of gallons of a solvent liquid with which the bile acid goes through its first reaction in its long, tedious process toward cortisone. Within hours this reaction is complete and a precipitant is added, causing Intermediate Compound No. 1 to separate from the solution as a white powder.
From then on, through miles of pipes and batteries of stills and filters, this intermediate and its successors are dissolved and crystallized out, redissolved and re-precipitated, filtered and centrifuged, catalyzed and concentrated, evaporated and distilled, boiled and chilled below zero. These processes go on around the clock, and the bile acid gets no Sundays off.