Alfred Bader

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Alfred Bader (2009)

Alfred Robert Bader (born April 28, 1924 in Vienna ; † December 23, 2018 in Milwaukee , Wisconsin , USA) was a Canadian chemist, entrepreneur, art collector and patron of Austrian origin. He was one of the two founders of the Aldrich company and for a long time President and Chairman of the Sigma-Aldrich company , one of the world's largest producers of research chemicals.

Origin and life

Bader's father Alfred was of Jewish origin and came from Moravia , his mother Elisabeth was Catholic and came from a Hungarian noble family. Bader's father and sister Gisela were the only children of Moritz Ritter von Bader and his wife Hermine, a née Freund. Moritz von Bader lived in his native town of Gaya , was involved in the construction of the Suez Canal as an engineer and was ennobled by Emperor Franz Joseph for his services as the Austrian consul in Ismailia . Bader's mother Elisabeth was the daughter of Count Johann Nepomuk Serényi and his wife Irma, Countess Dessewffy.

Alfred Bader's parents married in London in 1912 . The mother's family was against the wedding and subsequently broke off all relationships. Two weeks after Alfred Bader's birth, his father committed suicide. As a result, Alfred and his sister Marion were adopted by their aunt Gisela and grew up in Vienna. At the end of 1938 Alfred came to Great Britain as part of the Kindertransport campaign and attended Brighton Technical College, but was interned as an enemy alien two years later shortly after he was 16 and brought to Canada. Since 1945 Alfred Bader studied technical chemistry at Queen's University (Kingston) and financed his studies as an employee in the laboratory of Murphy Paint Co. in Montreal , a company for lacquers, paints and coatings, which was taken over a little later by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company has been. A scholarship allowed him to continue his studies in organic chemistry at Harvard University . He graduated there in 1950 with the title Ph.D. from. Louis Frederick Fieser was his PhD supervisor .

Alfred and his first wife Helen Bader have two sons: David M. and Daniel J. Bader, both of whom are head of Fund Bader Philanthropies , which was founded in 2015 . Alfred Bader's second wife is called Isabel Overton Bader.

Chemist and entrepreneur

Bader worked in the Pittsburgh Plate Glass research laboratory from 1950 to 1954. The then only supplier of research chemicals , Kodak , did not seem efficient and fast enough to him. For this reason, Bader and his friend at the time, the lawyer Jack N. Eisendrath, decided in 1951 to found their own company to produce and sell small quantities of special chemicals. The company had start-up capital of US $ 250, was named after Eisendrath's friend, the Aldrich Chemical Company , and was only able to deliver twelve products in 1952. The catalog was continually expanded and expanded considerably through the merger with Sigma Chemical Corporation in 1975. Bader became president of Sigma-Aldrich Corporation and was later chairman until 1991.

Bader also collected rare chemicals in the Library of Rare Chemicals , from which substances could still be ordered in small quantities at the end of 2009. He also founded the company magazine Aldrichimica Acta .

Art collector and patron

Bader was a collector since childhood. By his own admission, he began collecting postage stamps at the age of eight, drawings at the age of ten, paintings at the age of 20 and rare chemicals at the age of 30. In 1962 he founded the Bader Fine Arts art collection . Bader has been a patron for many years and financed both natural science and art projects together with his wife Isabel.

The Czech website alfred-bader.cz - Baderweb from Loschmidt Laboratories - lists 1 to 3 annually from 1993–2006, a total of 36 art research fellows on the subject of 17th century painting. In addition, 13 beneficiaries of Bader Fellowships in Chemistry from Harvard University in Cambridge, Columbia University in New York, Imperial College in London, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia over 1 to 5 years, from 1992 at the earliest and from 2005 at the latest.

The Loschmidt Laboratories (LL) are based on a working group from 1994 and a "donation" by Alfred and Isabel Bader which led to the foundation in 2005. The laboratory, located at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Masaryk University in Brno, conducts experimental biology and researches protein structures and environmental toxins.

Honors

The German-speaking Society for Art & Psychopathology of Expression e. V. (DGPA) awarded him the Hans Prinzhorn Medal in 1969 .

The University of Vienna made Bader an honorary citizen in 1995 and awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2012.

From 1980 to 1999 Bader received eight honorary doctorates from US and European universities, most recently from Masaryk University in Brno in 2000.

Since 1988 the American Chemical Society has given the Robert Bader Award in Bioinorganic or Bioorganic Chemistry for outstanding contributions in these areas. The Canadian Society for Chemistry also presents an Alfred Bader Award for excellent research in the field of organic chemistry to scientists working in Canada.

literature

Web links

  • Josef Loschmidt - one of Austria's greatest natural scientists in the 19th century , lecture by Alfred Bader at the Chemical-Physical Society on November 7, 2006 at the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Vienna - original link no longer effective. Video collection of the Austrian Central Library for Physics, University of Vienna.
  • Alfred Bader, Chemist and Art Collector Website in the Czech Republic. About Bader; Events in Brno in his honor in June 1996, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005; List of the annual winners of the Alfred Bader Prize for Organic Chemistry (1994–2007) and the Alfred Bader Prize for Organic Chemistry (2002–2007) (most recently) USD 3,300 each to Czech students for outstanding achievements, awarded by the Czech Chemical Society (CSCH ).
  • Martin Hanzlíček: Mecenáš české vědy: Alfred Bader ceskatelevize.cz, TV series Popularis (28 min), September 2, 2004. (Czech, German: Promoter of Czech science: Alfred Bader.)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bader, Alfred: Adventures of a chemist collector. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995.
  2. ^ Louis Fieser, Mary Fieser: Organische Chemie , Verlag Chemie Weinheim, 2nd edition, 1972, p. 1065, ISBN 3-527-25075-1 .
  3. ^ Helen Bader Foundation Announces Changes philanthropynewsdigest.org, PND, January 22, 2015, accessed March 20, 2017.
  4. ↑ Laudation for the award of the Ring of Honor of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (PDF; 28 kB), accessed on June 9, 2013.
  5. ↑ Group - Mission, Value, History Website of Loschmidt Laboratories, Brno, 2002–2017, accessed March 20, 2017.
  6. ^ DGPA: Winner of the Hans Prinzhorn Medal .
  7. ^ Honorary citizen of the University of Vienna .
  8. ↑ University of Vienna honors three Nazi refugees on ORF , December 3, 2012, accessed December 3, 2012.
  9. ^ Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic or Bioorganic Chemistry. American Chemical Society, accessed August 18, 2019 (with list of awardees).
  10. ^ Alfred Bader Award. Canadian Society for Chemistry, accessed August 18, 2019 (with list of awardees).
personal data
SURNAME Bader, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bader, Alfred Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian chemist, entrepreneur, art collector and patron
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 23 December 2018
Place of death Milwaukee , Wisconsin , USA