Pfizer was founded in 1849 on Bartlett Street in Brooklyn. Two immigrant cousins, chemist Charles Pfizer and confectioner Charles Erhart, combined their skills to produce santonin, an almond-flavored treatment for intestinal worms that became an immediate sensation. Pfizer was launched. From those humble beginnings, Pfizer has brought forth treatments that have transformed conditions such as cancer, heart disease and HIV/AIDS from virtual death sentences to chronic conditions that can be managed – and increasingly overcome.

Down through the decades, our commitment to the city that embraced us has never wavered. Although headquarters moved across the river in 1961 to its present location on East 42nd Street in Manhattan, Pfizer has never forgotten Brooklyn. We continue operating a major manufacturing plant there, and have invested millions of dollars in the surrounding neighborhood and community. During the dark days of the New York financial crisis of the mid-1970's, when many other businesses were fleeing New York, Pfizer stayed. After the outrage of Sept. 11, 2001, Pfizer donated more than $10 million to the survivors of the terrorist attack and their families. And unlike many businesses, Pfizer added jobs in New York City in the months that followed, rather than moving them elsewhere.

That kind of perseverance is not based on mere sentiment. Sentimentality doesn't get you very far in the hypercompetitive world of improving human health. We stay in New York because it makes good business sense.

New York's prominence in finance, banking, law, and communications have distracted attention from its role as an incubator of biomedical breakthroughs. But New York City is distinguished by some of the world's leading universities, medical centers, and research institutes, its proximity to the world's largest concentration of major pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey and Connecticut as well as New York, and its nascent but thriving biotechnology industry. In aggregate, New York City's medical schools, hospitals and research institutes garner one of the largest portions of the budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of any city in the U.S. Some of the world's premier medical and scientific research institutions – Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University – are located right here. Schools such as Brooklyn Polytechnic continue to send their graduates to Pfizer.

And then there is New York's unparalleled ability to attract highly qualified people, not only from across the nation but from around the world. The same desire to succeed that lured Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart to New York from Germany still burns bright in even the most distant corners of the globe, as a casual visit to almost any New York City neighborhood will attest.

That is a tremendous advantage for a business that relies on brainpower above all else for success. Pfizer and the entire life science industry are entering an era of enormous opportunity to discover and develop innovative medicines to produce better lives for millions of patients. Right now, Pfizer is in the midst of an ambitious "20 by 5" effort to register 20 new medicines, many of them for underserved patients, between 2001 and 2006. And we're already looking for the next 20 beyond that. Our scientists are working on breakthrough treatments in the realms of oncology, HIV/AIDS, high cholesterol, diabetes, smoking cessation, Parkinson's disease, and many more.

But none of these new products will do anyone any good if patients can't afford them. That's why Pfizer has been a leader in improving patient access and has made citizenship one of the metrics by which we measure our company's success.

Our commitment was underlined by the recent launch of two new programs, Pfizer Pfriends and Pfizer Helpful Answers.

Through Pfizer Pfriends, we are reaching out to all Americans without pharmaceutical coverage, an estimated 60 million people. All of these people will be able to get Pfizer medicines for free, at nominal charges, or at roughly the same prices negotiated by our largest customers, such as HMOs. Our announcement of this program won praise from across the political spectrum, including HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Helpful Answers is providing Americans with a one-stop resource for detailed information about patient assistance programs available from Pfizer http://www.pfizerhelpfulanswers.com, or through local, state and federal programs.

Our promising future in New York is best understood by considering our New York heritage.

In 1942, World War II was raging across the globe, with millions of troops engaged from the Arctic Circle to the Solomon Islands. But not all the battles were fought in Europe or the Pacific. One was fought in New York City by Pfizer and its researchers – and it emerged as one of the most crucial of all.

Since its discovery by Alexander Fleming in 1928, the wonder drug penicillin was mostly a laboratory curiosity. It took one worker one full day to make one flask of the antibiotic. During peacetime, this was unfortunate. But with wartime casualties mounting, finding a solution became imperative.

Enter Jasper Kane and John McKeen, two Pfizer employees who had, coincidentally, both been trained at Brooklyn's Polytechnic University.

A chemical engineer by trade, Kane had the inspiration: why not use the same deep-tank fermentation method that Pfizer used to make citric acid, then the company's leading product? Pure oxygen would be pumped inside huge vats equipped with large blades to circulate the air throughout the mixture. That way, the penicillin could "breathe" anywhere in the tank and not be restricted to the surface, as was the case with previous methods.

The task of executing Kane's radical idea fell to McKeen. An old ice factory in Brooklyn was taken over. With everything from scrap metal to gasoline rationed, McKeen was forced to seek out second-hand materials in order to get the plant open within the six-month deadline Pfizer had set. He found an old elevator on Long Island, and then drove all night to Indiana to inspect some second-hand boilers that were for sale.

McKeen got the job done in four months instead of six. Jasper Kane's idea worked, and was shared with other companies, and penicillin started flowing to the troops in the field. By the time of D-Day in June 1944, 90% of the penicillin that went ashore with the Allied forces was made by Pfizer. There is no way of knowing with precision how many lives were saved by penicillin during the war, but the number runs into the tens of thousands. And there is no question that its availability was a major advantage in sweeping the Allied cause to victory.

The kind of inspiration, imagination and follow-through personified by John McKeen, who later became Pfizer's chairman and CEO, and Jasper Kane, who is still alive and has just passed his 100th birthday, has characterized Pfizer throughout its 155 years. It's not just a classically American success story; it's a great New York success story.

To be sure, challenges lie ahead as well as opportunities. There is simply no substitute for private life sciences research. Important as they are, government and academia cannot do it all. Nearly 19 out of 20 new medicines put into the hands of doctors emerge from companies such as Pfizer, which takes tremendous pride in the power of its drug discovery efforts. But, as the story of penicillin illustrates, discovery is the first step in a very long process that delivers new medicines to patients in need. Technical challenges confront scientists from the laboratory, through the clinic and into manufacturing, where new ways must be found to mass produce our inventions. That's where a company such as Pfizer truly comes into its own. Our company and New York City and State can continue to be global leaders in the exciting quest for future cures. But Pfizer and other medical innovators depend on public policies that support high-risk, long-term pharmaceutical research and development and provide fair reimbursement for innovative medical products. A Pfizer medicine takes 10 to 15 years to develop, and requires an investment of $800 to $1.6 billion to put into the armamentarium of physicians. That kind of commitment can only take place in an environment that values biomedical research and development, and where policymakers understand that "the patient is waiting."

In far less time than has passed since Pfizer's "miracle of penicillin," we will begin our third century of partnership with New York City. With the proper environment, one in which biomedical research can flourish, there is no reason why Pfizer cannot continue to bring healthcare and economic benefits, not just to New Yorkers, but to all people worldwide.

Pfizer Inc, 235 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017, http://www.pfizer.comPhone: (212) 733-2323