Anton Köllisch
Anton Georg Köllisch was a German chemist who joined E. Merck in Darmstadt in October 1911, after a Berlin doctorate on indole synthesis from hydrazones. His assignment was to find a route to methylhydrastinine that would work around a Bayer patent on the haemostatic hydrastinine; along the way he prepared 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, which appears unnamed as Example 4 of Merck's process patent DE 274350 C, filed on 24 December 1912. Merck did not test the compound pharmacologically until 1927, and then only in animals, so Köllisch had no knowledge of what it did. He was killed in the First World War in September 1916; the compound was not named MDMA or given human use until decades later.
Compounds
1 credited across 1 class · 1 with a page here
- Methylenedioxyphenethylamines
- MDMA C11H15NO2 first synthesis, 1912 source
Made as a chemical intermediate on the way to methylhydrastinine, not as a drug candidate; described without a name in Merck patent DE 274350 C (filed 24 Dec 1912, published 16 May 1914). The long-repeated story that Merck was chasing an appetite suppressant is false — Freudenmann et al. traced it to uncritical repetition of secondary sources.
Reading
- The origin of MDMA (ecstasy) revisited: the true story reconstructed from the original documents (Addiction, 2006) · paper
- Truth about ecstasy's unlikely trip from lab to dance floor (The Guardian, 2006) · article
- German patent DE 274350 C, E. Merck, filed 24 December 1912 · archive
- Anton Köllisch (German Wikipedia — fuller biography than the English article) · article