 In 1978, Alfred Alberts and colleagues at Merck Research Laboratories discovered a new natural product in a fermentation broth of "Aspergillus terreus", their product showed good HMGR inhibition and they named the product mevinolin, which later became known as lovastatin.The cholesterol controversy began in the early promotion of statins.Statins are a competitive antagonists of HMG CoA, as they directly compete with the endogenous substrate for the active site cavity of HMGR.