Few companies are as universally recognized as Bayer, a name most people associate with the little white pill that cures a headache. That association is fitting, because Bayer essentially invented aspirin. The company traces its origins to 1860s Germany, when Friedrich Bayer and Johann Friedrich Weskott founded a business to produce synthetic dyes. By the end of the nineteenth century, the firm had expanded far beyond pigments and established a legendary pharmaceutical department.
There, a chemist named Felix Hoffmann, possibly working alongside fellow chemist Arthur Eichengrün, first synthesized the compound that became aspirin. The active ingredient had been used as a painkiller for centuries, but Bayer created the drug as the world came to know it. Even the word aspirin was a Bayer brand name. The company secured patents across the globe, including in the United States, which meant that in the early 1900s, Bayer was the only company legally permitted to sell it in America.
At first, aspirin was sold as a powder, but by 1915, Bayer was producing the familiar tablets stamped with the Bayer cross. Then, an odd twist of timing changed everything. The United States entered World War I just as Bayer’s American patent was expiring. In 1918, a US government-owned agency seized the trademark and auctioned it off to a company called Sterling for $5.
3 million. For more than 75 years, from 1918 until 1994, every Bayer aspirin sold in the United States was actually sold by another company. It took Bayer nearly eight decades to reacquire the American rights to its own invention. But aspirin is only one chapter in a long and troubled history.
Over the past 160 years, Bayer has produced extraordinary scientific advances and, according to its critics, a disturbing pattern of ethically questionable behavior. Many people now regard it as one of the most hated corporations in the world, and the reasons run deep. The most obvious criticism is simply the company’s enormous size and influence. Although the public knows Bayer for aspirin, that is a small part of its operations.
The Bayer Group consists of 291 consolidated companies operating in 80 countries and employing more than 90,000 people. It regularly appears on Fortune’s Global 500 list, with sales around $50 billion. Nearly half of that revenue comes from its Crop Science division, which the company describes as the world’s leading agricultural enterprise, dealing in seeds and herbicides. The rest comes from pharmaceuticals, prescription drugs, and consumer health products.
Over the decades, Bayer built this empire through a long series of major acquisitions. In 1978, it purchased Miles Laboratories, gaining control of Alka-Seltzer, One-A-Day vitamins, and Flintstones vitamins. In 2014, it spent $14 billion to acquire the rights to Claritin, Miralax, Coppertone, and Dr. Scholl’s, though it sold the latter two brands just five years later.
Many of Bayer’s largest business deals happen quietly, out of public view, but the result is a company with immense power across multiple industries. For many people, that concentration of control is dangerous in itself. A second reason dates back to the early 1900s and involves one of the most addictive drugs ever known: heroin. Bayer did not invent heroin, but it is widely considered the company most responsible for popularizing it.
In the early twentieth century, Bayer produced heroin commercially as a safer alternative to morphine. At the time, chronic coughing caused by tuberculosis and pneumonia was a serious problem, and Bayer sold heroin as a cough suppressant and painkiller. For a period, it was a key part of the company’s product line. As the drug’s addictive nature became better understood, doctors stopped recommending it.
Bayer ceased production in 1913, and heroin has since been banned outright in the United States. Still, the simple fact that a major pharmaceutical company once marketed heroin as a medicine remains difficult to reconcile. The third reason is far darker. In 1925, Bayer merged with five other German chemical companies to form IG Farben, which instantly became the dominant chemical enterprise in Germany, three times larger than all of its domestic competitors combined.
IG Farben developed close ties with Hitler and the Nazi Party. The History Channel has described it as the conglomerate that formed the financial heart of the Nazi regime. During World War II, IG Farben took control of chemical companies seized from conquered nations and relied heavily on forced labor. By 1940, forced laborers made up roughly a third of its workforce.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, IG Farben paid a doctor a retainer to test drugs on unwilling prisoners in concentration camps, often deliberately infecting them with the very conditions the drugs were meant to treat. After the war, the Allied forces seized IG Farben, dismantled it, and effectively reestablished Bayer as a separate company. But the association remains one of the most troubling chapters in corporate history. The fourth reason is another heavy subject, one that exploded into public view in the 1980s.
In 1974, Bayer acquired Cutter Laboratories, a company that marketed blood-clotting products for people with hemophilia. During the 1970s, a major medical advance allowed hemophiliacs to be treated with factor concentrate, a product made by pooling blood plasma from thousands of donors. But if some of those donors carried HIV, the patients who injected the concentrate were at risk of contracting the virus. By the 1980s, it became clear that some of these blood products were contaminated.
Bayer developed a newer, safer version that was heat-treated to kill any HIV present, but the company then faced a deeply troubling decision regarding its existing inventory of the older, contaminated product. According to reporting from the New York Times and other sources, Bayer continued to sell the old contaminated product in Asian and Latin American markets even after learning it was unsafe, likely because the company had invested heavily in it and did not want to write off the loss. The result was that hundreds of people were infected with HIV. Multiple legal settlements followed, but the company never admitted wrongdoing.
The final reason brings the story into the present day. In 2018, Bayer completed a deal to acquire the agricultural giant Monsanto for more than $60 billion. It was not only the largest acquisition in Bayer’s history but the largest ever made by a German company. It also became one of the most criticized mergers of all time.
Monsanto had a notoriously poor reputation, built on its involvement with the atomic bomb during World War II, its production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and more recently, its role in genetically modified organisms and the highly controversial herbicide Roundup. Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate, has been linked to cancer in numerous lawsuits. As the new owner of Monsanto, Bayer inherited all of that criticism and became the defendant in an enormous wave of expensive, high-profile litigation. In 2020, just months after Bayer completed the acquisition, the company agreed to a $10 billion settlement related to Roundup claims.
Meanwhile, the combined value of the two companies on the stock market steadily declined, eventually falling below the price Bayer had paid for Monsanto alone. The two companies together were worth less than what Bayer had spent to acquire just one of them. There is, of course, another side to the story. A scientist working for Bayer received the Nobel Prize in 1939 for discovering an antibacterial drug.
The company has contributed to medicine and science in countless ways over more than 160 years. But when all of these events are considered together, the criticism becomes difficult to dismiss. Bayer is a company that popularized heroin, formed close connections with the Nazi regime, allegedly continued selling blood products known to carry HIV, and entered into one of the most controversial mergers in corporate history.
It is one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, and for millions of people, that power has been used in ways they cannot forgive.