George W. Merck was an American chemical industry executive.
Background
George Wilhelm Herman Emanuel Merck was born on March 29, 1894, in New York City. He was the son of George Merck and Friedrike Schenck, a native of Antwerp, Belgium. His father, the son of the senior partner of Merck Chemical Works in Darmstadt, Germany, had come to New York in 1890 to manage the company sales office and warehouse, and when Merck and Company was incorporated in 1908, he became its president. The firm continued importing and also expanded the manufacturing of fine chemicals begun in 1903 at Rahway, New Jersey, Merck spent his youth at Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey.
Education
Merck attended Newark Academy and Morristown School, and received the B. A. from Harvard in 1915, having majored in chemistry.
Career
The outbreak of war in Europe thwarted George's plans for graduate study in Germany and sent him to the Merck and Company laboratories, where he rotated through a series of jobs. When the United States entered the war, he became plant manager. The war, cutting off German imports, brought prosperity to American chemical manufacturers. Merck's father, an American citizen since 1902, voluntarily gave 80 percent of the company stock, representing claims on the business by German members of the family, to the alien property custodian. In 1918, Merck and Company was reorganized, with the father as president and the younger Merck as vice-president. Merck became the president of Merck and Company in 1925. Two years later he merged the firm with a Philadelphia producer of fine chemicals, Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten Company, the expanded corporation being known as Merck and Company. The firm was esteemed for the quality of its pharmaceutical, photographic, reagent, and industrial chemicals. Its products included medicinal alkaloids such as morphine and quinine, for which the Mercks had long been famous in Germany. Merck engaged in a continuing quest for new products and for increased sales. A pioneering and aggressive champion of the systematization of research, he opened enlarged laboratories in Rahway in 1933 and created a campus atmosphere in order to lure academic scientists who had scorned industrial research as inimical to pure science. The company introduced an interdisciplinary approach to research. Merck offered his scientists "the greatest possible latitude and scope in pursuing their investigations, the utmost freedom to follow leads promising scientific results no matter how unrelated to what one would call practical returns, " as well as freedom to publish. Several vitamins B1, B2, B6, pantothenic acid, and B12 were first synthesized by Merck scientists, alone or in collaboration with other scientists, and Merck began large-scale production of virtually all vitamins needed in human nutrition. The company was also an early manufacturer of sulfa drugs, and the first penicillin used to treat an infection in the United States was made by Merck. But the company concentrated on trying to synthesize penicillin, which did not prove commercially practicable, rather than plunging into its production in fermentation plants. The discoverer of streptomycin, Selman Waksman, received support from Merck; at his request, the company waived its contractual provision for "sole right" of commercial development, but it did become the leading producer of streptomycin.
Merck served on the National Research Council Committee on Drugs and Medical Supplies (1942 - 1945) and was appointed by presidents Harry S. Truman (1951) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1954) to the board of the National Science Foundation. Merck was president (1949 - 1952) of the Manufacturing Chemists' Association and director of such diverse organizations as the American Cancer Society, the American Foundation for Tropical Medicine, the National Industrial Conference Board, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and the Save-the-Redwood League.
Merck's major responsibility outside his own company came during World War II. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made him director of the War Research Service, a civilian agency charged with all biological warfare research and development. In 1944 this work was put within the Chemical Warfare Service of the War Department. Merck remained as a special consultant to the secretary of war and was named the chairman of the Biological Warfare Committee. His experience caused Merck to warn that biological warfare posed even graver threats to humanity than the atomic bomb. Competition in the postwar drug industry proved extremely sharp. Hitherto Merck and Company had operated principally as a manufacturing chemist, supplying medicinal drugs to pharmaceutical firms that formulated, compounded, packaged, and resold the ingredients in finished form to physicians and pharmacists. Now the firms were producing drugs that, as single entities, were ready to be prescribed without further processing. Merck decided to abandon the traditional role of the company as an ingredient supplier and to enter the competition with its long-time customers. To strengthen entry by the firm into the new markets, Merck merged in 1953 with Sharp and Dohme, a long-established company with an excellent reputation among doctors and druggists, and with an experienced force of retail drug salesmen. Merck resigned the presidency in 1950, having become chairman of the board in 1949. He held the latter post until his death at West Orange, New Jersey.
Achievements
George W. Merck is known as the president of Merck & Co. from 1925 to 1950. Merck research personnel and university scientists supported by the company made fundamental contributions to the chemotherapeutic revolution that began in the 1930's. Five outside scientists later received Nobel prizes for work done in collaboration with Merck. Merck scientists also had important roles in the discovery of cortisone and other corticosteroids. In 1933, Merck helped draft the National Recovery Administration code for the basic chemical industry and became a member of the code authority. After the war, Merck received the Medal of Merit.
Personality
Merck was a vigorous, informal man with an easy smile. He possessed a tremendous capacity for work and an unusual ability to inspire his co-workers with the fervor of his own enthusiasm.
Connections
On September 22, 1917, Merck married Josephine Carey Wall; they had two sons. The marriage ended in divorce, and on November 24, 1926, Merck married Serena Stevens; they had three children.
