Merck, Heinrich Emanuel

Heinrich Emanuel Merck, intimate friend of Justus von Liebig, and foimder of the first factory of the enterprise, E. Merck, Darmstadt (Germany), had as his main objective the preparation of pure alkaloids. His many achievements included the original commercial manufacture of moiphine (1827), codeine (1836), and cocaine (1862). 

The American house of Merck, established in 1887 in New York and organi2 d in 1891 as Merck Co. by George Merck, grandson of Heinrich Emanuel Merck, was incorporated in 1908 in New York and in 1919 became an independent American enterprise, consolidated with Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten Co. of Philadelphia, Pa., in 1927 to form Merck Co., Inc. 

Dovichi, N.J. and Zhang, J., How capillary electrophoresis sequenced the human genome this essay is based on a lecture given at the Analytica 2000 conference in Munich (Germany) on the occasion of the Heinrich-Emanuel-Merck prize presentation, Angew Chem Int Ed Engl, 39, 4463, 2000. 

Almost at the same time, in 1827, the Prussian Government allowed physicians and pharmacists in Germany to acquire drugs from factories, which would otherwise require laborious procedures. Heinrich Emanuel Merck (1794-1855) took advantage of this act and started his business with alkaloids, which he had isolated or prepared in purified form (Fig. 5.56 and Fig. 5.57). The example of Merck in Darmstadt was followed later by Schering and Riedel in Berlin. [90]... 

Heinrich Emanuel Merck (1794-1855) produced morphine in the Engel pharmacy, and sold it to other pharmacists, chemists and physicians. 

In 1834, codeine was isolated from opium by Pierre Jean Robiquet (1780-1840). One year later, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier (1788-1842) and M. Thiboumery discovered thebaine (named after the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes). In 1848, at the University of Giessen, papaverine was extracted from poppy waste by Georg Merck (1825-1873), the son of Heinrich Emanuel Merck. In 1870, Augustus Matthiessen (1831-1870) and Charles R. A. Wright (1844-1894) recognised that codeine is the monomethyl ether of morphine. After the selective methylation of morphine for the preparation of codeine had failed, Felix Hoffmann (1868-1946) tried out in 1897 a selective acetylation, in analogy to the synthesis of aspirin from salicylic acid. [91]... 

Auguste Laurent (1807-1853) and Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), a close friend of Heinrich Emanuel Merck, correctly deduced in 1847 the empirical formula of morphine as C,7H,N03. 

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