Penicillin Grows in Brooklyn

Brooklyn's Charles Pfizer & Co., Inc., the world's largest producer of penicillin, made news on Wall Street last week. In one day, Pfizer stock jumped six points, to 79. This was phenomenal for a stock selling at 35 five months ago. But not for Pfizer. Fortnight ago demand was so heavy for Pfizer stock at the market's opening that no price could be set. When it finally opened, it was up six points over the previous day's close. Reason: Pfizer issued a quarterly report that net income, $553,352 in the first quarter of 1945, had jumped to $2,857,788; earnings were up from $1.10 to $1.94 a share. With $900,000 of this cash, Pfizer last week bought the surplus 30-acre Submarine Victory Yard in Groton, Conn.

This newcomer to Wall Street tip sheets was far from being a newcomer to the chemical field. Started by two German chemists, Charles Pfizer and his brother-in-law Charles Erhart, in 1849, the company soon got a reputation for producing high quality chemicals. But it was still small in 1923, when it began producing citric acid by a new process, the vegetative fermentation of sugar. Up till then citric acid, the most widely used organic acid in the food and beverage field, was produced chiefly in Europe from lemon and lime juice. With its new process, Pfizer broke the foreign monopoly.

Pfizer began producing other chemicals by fermentation (oxalic acid, gluconic acid, sorbose). Thus, when the Government launched a top-secret program in 1943 to get penicillin mold produced in large quantities, Pfizer was one of the companies chosen for the job. Many chemists doubted that it could be done. But Pfizer President George A. Anderson, now Board Chairman, risked $3 million of Pfizer cash to build a new plant, was the first to mass-produce penicillin.

Pfizer brought the price of penicillin down from $20 per 100,000 units to less than $1. This chemical miracle was primarily the work of John L. Smith, the practical-minded chemist who now runs the Pfizer Co. Smith, a shy man with an intense dislike of publicity, was born in Germany, came to the U.S. at the age of three. He learned some chemistry in school, was further helped by his father, who had taken a correspondence course in it. Later, Smith attended Cooper Union, but left before getting his degree to go to work as a laboratory assistant at Pfizer's. In 1945 he was named president. A baseball fan, he now owns a 25% interest in the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Although penicillin is still Pfizer's main product (it turns out over one-third of the U.S. output), it is also making the latest wonder drug, streptomycin. But Pfizer feels that streptomycin has a "clouded future," as yet has no plans for mass production. When it gets the new Groton plant in operation, Pfizer expects to double production of its other products.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.