Photo Gallery How East German Doctors Were Bribed
Sanofi-Aventis is the legal successor of Hoechst, one of many drug manufacturers -- most from West Germany, Switzerland and the United States -- that engaged East German hospitals to perform more than 600 clinical drug trials, some with fatal consequences.
It has now emerged that envoys from the West were running a corrupt system to recruit East German doctors for their controversial drug trials. Companies like Pfizer and Bayer also employed lobbyists to develop high-level contacts in the GDR.
In a report to the Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, one East German physician describes visiting the booth of the Swiss drug maker Ciba-Geigy (now part of Novartis) at the Leipzig Trade Fair. The doctor said he was taken "behind the scenes" and treated "very smoothly."
As questions mount, leading drug manufacturers remain reluctant to address them. Bayer, based in Leverkusen near Cologne and one of the key players in the GDR drug trials affair, has rejected interview requests for weeks, without offering any reasons.
Boehringer Mannheim, which was later acquired by the Swiss Roche Group, even assigned an employee with a PhD in chemistry to a liaison office in West Berlin. The lobbyist was given something that was very unusual: an official permanent visa, which allowed him to enter the GDR at any time.
Sandoz is another company implicated in the scandal. On June 3, 1987, a lobbyist employed by the company visited a regional clinic for psychiatry and neurology in Bernburg, near Leipzig. A doctor watched him unload his drug samples, and then the two men had coffee and talked about working together on an upcoming drug trial. "He wants the trial to be processed as quickly and with as few complications as possible," the doctor noted afterward.
