ABSTRACT

The modern pharmaceutical industry can trace its beginnings to two sources (i) local apothecaries—now called chemists in the United Kingdom and pharmacists in the United States—that expanded from their traditional role distributing botanical drugs such as morphine and quinine to wholesale manufacture in the mid-1800s. By the late 1880s, German dye manufacturers had perfected the purification of individual organic compounds from coal tar and other mineral sources and had also established fundamental methods in organic chemical synthesis. The development of synthetic chemical methods allowed scientists to systematically vary the structure of chemical substances, and growth in the emerging science of pharmacology expanded their ability to evaluate the biological effects of these structural changes. It is from these early beginning and the recognition of the wealth of chemical that could be produced from crude oil that led to the rapid expansion of the medicines-from-crude-oil industry as an extension of the petrochemical industry.