Merck’s vision of corporate responsibility (CR) is founded upon the Company's values and an approach to business articulated by our founder’s son George W. Merck in 1950: “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.”

…How can we bring the best of medicine to each and every person?... We cannot step aside and say that we have achieved our goal by inventing a new drug or a new way by which to treat presently incurable diseases…We cannot rest till the way has been found, with our help, to bring our finest achievements to everyone.”

George W. Merck's philosophy remains the foundation of our approach to CR today. Although Merck has long operated by these beliefs, our processes for managing some aspects of our corporate responsibilities have not always been formal. Since  2008 we have made significant progress towards our commitment to communicate about the Company's CR practices and performance.

We recognize that successfully managing social, ethical and environmental issues involves everyone at Merck. For this reason, as outlined in our 2006-2007 Corporate Responsibility Report, we established a new Company-wide process for identifying the CR issues that are most important to our business success and to our stakeholders, and for more formally managing those issues in terms of performance and targets.

This section provides the context for our CR policy, processes and programs; our Company mission and values; our CR principles; our materiality assessment process; how we govern and manage our CR approach and performance; our review with external stakeholders of our reporting approach.