The news that Merck is cutting 1,200 sales reps made headlines, but researchers who work on natural products in Madrid weren’t too thrilled either. That’s because the drugmaker is closing down the 50-year-old research effort, although the disclosure was a mistake - a Merck executive inadvertently included the plan in a PowerPoint presentation to an audience that included Merck employees.

The decision to shutter in-house natural products research will affect about 50 researchers in Spain and “a significantly smaller number” in Rahway, New Jersey, according to a Merck spokesman. “There has been no decision made on what is happening to those folks,” he tells Chemical & Engineering News. But “at the end of the day, synthetic chemistry has taken over.”

“The investment involved in finding these chemicals in the environment is significant. The products that came out of our effort have been significant as well, but that was over a 50-year period,” the spokesman tells the mag. The most recent Merck drug derived from a natural product is the Cancidas antifungal, which was introduced in 2002. Another was the old cholester pill, Mevacor.

For a view from the bench, check out Derek Lowe’s take at In The Pipeline