Bayer "heroin" for the drug diacetylmorphine and marketed it as a cough suppressant and non-addictive substitute for morphine until 1910. Bayer also introduced phenobarbital; prontosil, the first widely used antibiotic and the subject of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Medicine; the antibiotic Cipro (ciprofloxacin); and Yaz (drospirenone) birth control pills. In 1925 Bayer was one of six chemical companies that merged to form IG Farben, the world's largest chemical and pharmaceutical company. The Allied Control Council seized IG Farben after World War II, because of its role in the Nazi war effort and involvement in the Holocaust, which included using slave
Bayer designation Bayer designation A Bayer designation is a stellar designation in which a specific star is identified by a Greek or Latin letter followed by the genitive form of its parent constellation's Latin name. The original list of Bayer designations contained 1,564 stars. Most of the brighter stars were assigned their first systematic names by the German astronomer Johann Bayer in 1603, in his star atlas "Uranometria". Bayer assigned a lower-case Greek letter (alpha (α), beta (β), gamma (γ), etc.) or a Latin letter (A, b, c, etc.) to each star he catalogued, combined with the Latin name of the star's