Former Swiss pharmaceutical company formed in 1970 from the merger of Ciba AG and J.R. Geigy SA. Ciba started out in the 1850s as a silk-dyeing business and branched out into pharmaceuticals in 1900, by which time it was the largest chemical company in Switzerland.
J.R. Geigy dates to 1758, when Johann Rudolf Geigy set up a chemist's shop in Basel. The company soon began manufacturing dyes for the textile industry. It entered the pharmaceutical market in the 1930s. The name was shortened to Ciba in 1992, and in 1996 Ciba's merger with the Swiss company Sandoz formed Novartis AG , one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.