Short answers, pulled from the story.
Bayer AG was founded in 1863 in Barmen, Germany, by dye salesman Friedrich Bayer (1825-1880) and master dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott (1821-1876). It was established as a dyestuffs company before expanding into pharmaceuticals and other fields.
The underlying compound, acetylsalicylic acid, was first described by French chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt in 1853. Bayer registered the Aspirin trademark worldwide in 1899. The discovery of the specific formulation is disputed between Bayer chemist Arthur Eichengrün and research assistant Felix Hoffmann, with most historians crediting both.
Yes. Bayer trademarked and marketed heroin (diacetylmorphine) from 1898 to 1910 as a cough suppressant and non-addictive substitute for morphine. The name came from heroisch, the German word for heroic. Bayer did not synthesize heroin first but was the leading force in commercializing it.
In 1925 Bayer merged with five other German companies to form IG Farben. By 1943, nearly half of IG Farben's 330,000-person workforce consisted of slave laborers or conscripts, including 30,000 Auschwitz prisoners. A Bayer group employee conducted lethal medical experiments on inmates, and convicted war criminal Fritz ter Meer was later elected chairman of Bayer AG's supervisory board in 1956.
Bayer acquired Monsanto for $66 billion in 2018. Roundup herbicide litigation that followed caused massive financial and reputational damage, with Bayer agreeing to pay $9.6 billion in June 2020 to settle more than 10,000 lawsuits. By 2023, Bayer's market value had declined by more than 60% from its 2016 level, leaving the company worth less than half of what it paid for Monsanto.
After Bayer's Cutter Laboratories subsidiary identified HIV contamination in its Factor VIII blood products in the mid-1980s, documents that emerged in 2003 showed that Cutter continued selling unheated, contaminated products in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, and Argentina until 1985. Thousands of hemophiliacs developed AIDS as a result. In 1997, Bayer and three other makers agreed to pay $660 million to settle cases for more than 6,000 infected hemophiliacs in the United States.