Das wissenschaftliche Unternehmen

The scientific enterprise. Chemical-pharmaceutical research at E. Merck, Darmstadt, ca. 1900 to 1930This article deals with the development of academic research within the pharmaceutical firm E. Merck, Darmstadt, between 1900 and 1930. One main purpose is to clarify to what extent the widespread notion is justified that external research gave way for internal research in order to maintain a leading position in innovativeness. Therefore the article analyses the way of co-operation between Merck and Richard Willstätter in the case of cocaine-synthesis around 1900, and the co-operation with Adolf Windaus with regard to vitamin D during the 1920s. The article concludes that internal research was indeed intensified during the interwar period, on the one hand. But this development is, on the other hand, better understood as a necessary precondition if the firm wanted prospectively be able to participate at novel developments in vitamin chemistry. The co-operation between the chemical laboratory of the university of Goettingen, the Merck research laboratory, and the pharmaceutical laboratory of I.G. Farbenindustrie AG are more aptly interpreted as an interconnected research network in which each part contributed original insights and, occasionally, breakthroughs.

April 1915: Five future Nobel Prize–winners inaugurate weapons of mass destruction and the academic–industrial–military complex

Poison gas warfare was initiated in the Great War by a German military unit that included five future Nobel laureates: James Franck, Fritz Haber, Otto Hahn, Gustav Hertz and Walther Nernst. It was Haber's idea to use poison gas. To implement gas warfare he devised an organization that meshed the academy into the military–industrial complex. Later three other Nobel laureates, Emil Fischer, Heinrich Wieland and Richard Willstätter, contributed to the enterprise. Huge quantities of poisons were used by both sides during the war, because they were well adapted to static trench warfare, even though—which is a surprise to many—they were substantially less deadly than explosives.