He was an apprentice in a pharmacy at the age of 16; then became the world's pharmaceutical king: Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly was born on July 8, 1838. He started his career as an apprentice in a pharmacy at the age of 16. He went to college to study pharmacology. The Civil War of 1861 interrupted his career. Joining the Union Army, Lilly rose to the rank of colonel before he was 27 and led the artillery until he was taken prisoner by the abolitionist southern army. He was taken prisoner in September 1864. After his captivity of war and torture, his life took a completely different path.

Witnessing fellow officers dying in a POW camp in Alabama gave Lilly a first-hand insight into the ravages of 19th-century illness that he undoubtedly carried with his for the rest of his life. At a time when unreliable and often dangerous "panacea" products were being sold to an unsuspecting public, Lilly wanted to produce reliable, high-quality medicines. He began creating a range of medicinal products specifically for doctors to use when treating their patients. He opened Eli Lilly and Company on May 10, 1876, in a two-story building in Indianapolis.

In 1886, he hired full-time scientists chemist Ernest Eberhardt and botanist Walter Evans to research new products. His company spent more than $5 billion a year on research and development through 2016.

DO YOU KNOW?

This company launched the world's first commercial insulin product, Iletin, for the treatment of diabetes in 1923. At that time, diabetes was an almost deadly disease and had no cure. Lilly, along with the University of Toronto, developed the first commercially produced insulin, which the company branded as Iletin. Derived from animal insulin, J.J.R. Efforts to develop Iilen were awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Eli Lilly was also the first company to manufacture and distribute Jonas Salk's polio vaccine worldwide. Today, Lilly is best known for the clinical depression drugs Prozac (1986) and Cymbalta (2004) and the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa (1996). But the biggest sources of income are the diabetes drugs Trulicity (2014) and Humalog (1996). The company is included in the Fortune 500.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY:

Bayer was founded in 1845 as a paint company. Felix Hoffmann, a Bayer chemist, was reading ancient medicine books to relieve his father's arthritis pain. He learned that willow tree is used as a pain reliever. Then, in 1897, he extracted and separated acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) from willow. After his father's pain relief, Bayer entered the pharmaceutical industry and began to sell this product as a pain reliever under the name "Aspirin".

Roche, which produces chemical products and plant-based syrups, was established in Basel in 1887. German-born Charles Pfizer settled in America, where he went in 1848, and established a chemical company. It supplies products such as citric acid, known as citric acid, to companies such as CocaCola.

Founded as a food company in England in 1873, Glaxo became one of the companies that entered the pharmaceutical industry after the Second World War. In 2000, it merged with another pharmaceutical company, SmithKline, to become GSK. Yet another Basel company, Novartis, emerged in 1996 with the merger of Ciba-Geigy, a very old paint company, and Sandoz, another chemical company founded in 1886.

Eli Lilly, founder of Eli Lilly, dies of cancer, Merck founder of medicine, George W. Merck of cerebral hemorrhage, Carl Josef Bayer, who transformed Bayer into a pharmaceutical company, dies of a heart attack at a young age.