Abbott Laboratories

The campus spreading along Route Forty-Three in North Chicago is one of the most consequential pharmaceutical addresses in the world. This is Abbott Laboratories, and it started in a bedroom.

In eighteen eighty-eight, a thirty-year-old physician named Wallace Calvin Abbott was dissatisfied with the drugs he was prescribing. The morphine, quinine, and codeine available to him came as liquid alkaloid extracts that spoiled unpredictably and varied in potency from batch to batch. He had heard that a Belgian surgeon had developed alkaloids in solid form. Abbott tried the pills available in Chicago, found them unreliable, and began making his own in his apartment in the Ravenswood neighborhood on Chicago's north side.

By eighteen ninety-one he was advertising to other physicians. By nineteen hundred he had incorporated as the Abbott Alkaloidal Company. By nineteen fifteen the name had shortened to Abbott Laboratories. The company moved its headquarters to North Chicago in nineteen twenty-two, spreading along a rail corridor that let it receive raw materials and ship finished drugs nationwide.

Through the twentieth century Abbott became one of the largest diversified healthcare companies in the world, producing not just pharmaceuticals but diagnostics, nutritional products including Similac infant formula, and medical devices. The campus here eventually grew to employ tens of thousands of people in the northern Chicago suburbs alone.

In January of twenty thirteen, Abbott split itself in two. The research-based pharmaceutical division became a new company called AbbVie, focused on drugs like Humira, which became the best-selling prescription medication in history. The legacy Abbott kept its name and focused on diagnostics and devices.

Both companies remained headquartered in this corridor. When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in twenty twenty, Abbott moved with unusual speed and received federal emergency use authorization for a fifteen-minute rapid test priced at five dollars a unit, hiring two thousand additional workers in the Chicago area to meet demand. At the height of the pandemic, Abbott was the nation's leading manufacturer of coronavirus tests.

The doctor who started it all by making his own pills in a Ravenswood bedroom died in nineteen twenty-one. His company had by then already outgrown anything he could have imagined.