Tylenol Creator Dies As J&J Scandal Intensifies
3 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // May 26th, 2010 // 7:30 am
There is a sad irony here. Last Thursday, Robert McNeil, who concocted Tylenol back in 1955, passed away at age 94. After more than a half century of phenomenal success, his death occurred just as Johnson & Johnson became embroiled in a quality-control scandal over several recalls of dozens of products, most notably different forms of Tylenol (see background here and here).
At such an advanced age, we are hard pressed to say the scandal sent him to an early grave or that it served as some sort of tipping point. Nonetheless, Johnson & Johnson execs will have to work overtime now to do him right. The healthcare giant, which has traded for decades on its credo of doing right by investors, employees and patients, has been tarnished a bit by this latest episode.
As for McNeil, who was raised in Philadelphia, he attended Yale University and the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science before going to work at his family’s pharmacy, which started in 1879 and later focused on dispensing drugs to docs. He expanded into research and developed Tylenol Elixir for Children, which was advertised “for little hotheads” and sold in a package modeled on a fire engine. He wound up selling McNeil Laboratories to J&J for $33 million in 1959 and became a philanthropist (you can read more here and here).
pharmavet
These were true pioneers in our field. I was privileged some years ago to hear a lecture by Dr. Stewart Adams, the pharmacologist at my company (Boots Pharmaceuticals) who discovered ibuprofen. Their experiments were so elegantly simple that they probably would not be approved today. Dr. Adams basically took two groups of guinea pigs and shaved their backs. Each group received a dose of ultraviolet radiation to produce an inflammatory respnse simulating sunburn. One group was pre-treated with ibuprofen, the other was not. The iboprofen-treated group was shown to have markedly reduced iflammation compared to controls.
This discovery of the first NSAID significantly reduced the need for corticosteroids, with all their side effect, and merited the Queen’s Award for Techical Achievment, given to Dr. Adams in 1987.
http://www.york.ac.uk/enterprise/cetle/resources/WRCE/Case%20Study%20-%20Boots%20the%20Chemist.pdf
Krishna Talluri, MD
A notable fact about the origin of Acetaminophen.
Tylenol [acetaminophen] was discovered by David W. Young, a graduate of Covington Latin School and the University of Kentucky, while working on chemical patents at Standard Oil of Ohio in Cleveland, Ohio (courtesy wilkipedia)
When acetaminophen was discovered, it was thought to be useless. Due to that reason, the patent automatically went to David Young himself, rather than to the University employer. Young later sold the patent to Johnson & Johnson. It was then marketed by J&J as Tylenol in 1955, initially for children, later on to all ages.
pharmavet
Thanks, Dr. Talluri. I hope that Dr. Young sell to J&J a royalty-free patent.
Your story reminds me of one that I heard that the next great drug is probably some shelf chemical sitting around whose use is yet to be discovered. It happened exactly that way with the discovery of aspartame as an artificial sweetener. The Searle chemist who discovered it got some on his fingers one day in the lab. When he wetted his finger to pick up a piece of filter paper he noticed a sweet taste, and the rest was history once CEO Don Rumsfeld convinced the FDA that the product’s benefits greatly exceeded the risks.