Until the government was able to agree on a reduced price of 95 cents a tablet for 100 million tablets, there was discussion about whether and how Congress could invalidate Bayer Pharmaceutical's patent on Cipro in the interest of national security.
All of those problems caused Bayer's pharmaceutical division to post a small loss this quarter, says Merrill Lynch analyst James Knight.
True, but Bayer's pharmaceutical division has dropped from tenth place in the world by sales ten years ago to sixteenth place now.
There would be nothing to stop Bayer from selling the pharmaceutical business without the potential Baycol liabilities.
Those teams were founded by pharmaceutical company Bayer and car manufacturer Volkswagen respectively and are 100% owned by these companies, with the stadiums -- BayArena and Volkswagen Arena -- named in their honor.
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So why then was a British conglomerate eager to pay five times sales and compete in a bidding war with German Pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG for the prize of the lumbering Schiff Nutrition?
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But it took a crisis at the 139-year-old company to get management to even consider spinning off its drugs business: the recall in 2001 of Baycol, the cholesterol-lowering drug, which cost Bayer most of its pharmaceutical profits last year.
In the 1990s several big pharmaceutical firms, including Bayer AG of Germany, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, formed alliances with Chinese research institutes or companies that specialized in traditional Chinese medicines, aiming to apply modern drug-hunting techniques to screen Chinese herbal medicines for potential Western blockbusters.
In the 1990s several big pharmaceutical firms, including Bayer (nyse: BAY - news - people ) AG of Germany, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, formed alliances with Chinese research institutes or companies that specialized in traditional Chinese medicines, aiming to apply modern drug-hunting techniques to screen Chinese herbal medicines for potential Western blockbusters.
While other pharmaceutical shares have soared, Bayer is weighed down by the rest of its chemical business and stuck on the sidelines as the rest of the sector consolidates.
The author of the proposal, Thomas Shrager, a partner at Tweedy, Browne, a money manager in New York City, has lobbied Bayer's management for months to free its undervalued pharmaceutical business from the rest of the conglomerate.
Bayer said the patent panel's order weakens the international patent system and endangers pharmaceutical research.
While the promising results for Nexavar may bring tears to the eyes of Bayer researchers and hope to cancer patients, doctors have lately become used to such breakthroughs, with pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca testing dozens of new targeted cancer pills.
If Bayer does purchase CropScience, it will further drive home a point that has increasingly become apparent to anyone watching the pharmaceutical industry: The drug business does not leave energy for diversification.
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