Pharmaceutical Industry

The pharmaceutical industry concerns the discovery, development, and manufacturing of various means related to human and veterinary health, ranging from drugs or medications to biologically based therapies and methods for diagnosing ­diseases. Pharmaceuticals in the form of herbs and [Page 1268]potions assumed to have healing or pain-relieving powers, as well as various methods of therapy, have a history of thousands of years. However, the pharmaceutical industry in the sense of the organized manufacturing of drugs, based mainly on scientific discoveries, did not emerge before sometime around the 19th century. Aspirin was first invented by Bayer in 1897 and subsequently launched on the general market in 1900. Germany was for a time called the pharmacy of the world because of its dominance of the pharmaceutical industry ...