The successful pharmaceutical industry esblished by Auschwitz nerve gas creator IG Farben motivated John D. Rockefeller to fund the restructuring of American medical school
In the late 19th century, John D. Rockefellerās buisness advisor Fredrick Gates had him to open a medical research institute. But Rockefeller was just getting started in the drug business. Aside from the Rockefellers, the next biggest shareholder in Standard Oil was German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, best known for creating Zyklon B, the nerve gas used in Auschwitz. By the early 1900s, Farben had developed a successful pharmaceutical industry, with drugs such as aspirin, salvarsan (an arsenic compound used for syphilis), and novocaine.
Rockefeller saw yet a new drug opportunity and untapped marketābut he also saw that American physicians didnāt know about these new pharmaceuticals, in part because they didnāt learn about them in medical school. Rockefeller needed distributors to sling this product, and so green-lighted a project to completely re-evaluate the American medical school system in order to dismantle it and reformulate it to focus on medical research and drug therapy. Abraham Flexner was assigned to direct John D. Rockefellers restructering of American medical school.
References
- Lustig, Robert. (2021). Metabolical Chapter 6. Because Big Pharma Was Their Teacher (p. 114). New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.