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Novartis, a biotechnology corporation and pharmaceutical
company, had its origins in the merger of the CIBA-Geigy and Sandoz Laboratories in
Basel, Switzerland.
In 1998, the company made headlines with its biotechnology licensing agreement with the
UC Berkeley Department of Plant and
Microbial Biology. Critics of the
agreement were concerned that the agreement would diminish academic objectivity or that it would lead to the commercialization of
genetically modified plants. The agreement expired in 2003.
Novartis combined its agricultural division with that of Astra Zeneca to
create Syngenta in November of 2000.
Sandoz is best known for synthesizing LSD in 1938.
They later marketed it (under the trade name Delysid) as a psychiatric
miracle cure from 1947 through the early 1960s.
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