Marguerite Steiger

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marguerite Steiger (born April 12, 1909 in Zurich-Unterstrass ; † December 10, 1990 in Zurich ) was a Swiss entrepreneur . The chemist founded Opopharma AG together with the pharmacist Hermine Raths .

Life

Marguerite Steiger was the youngest daughter of the dyeing industrialist Otto Steiger and a great-granddaughter of Jakob Robert Steiger . After attending primary school, she went to a private school in Zurich and later spent a year in a girls' boarding school near Lausanne . In 1926 she met Hermine Raths. The two friends moved into a property owned by the Steiger family on Blüemlisalpstrasse and studied at the ETH Zurich . While Hermine Raths chose pharmacy , Marguerite Steiger became a chemist . Marguerite Steiger was the first Swiss woman and the second woman to receive a doctorate from what was then Department IV (Chemistry) at ETH. Her work Investigation of sugars with ribose configuration via vitamin C was supervised by Leopold Ruzicka and Tadeus Reichstein . After completing her doctorate, Marguerite Steiger continued to work with Reichstein at the university before moving to Alexander R. Todd in 1938 . Reichstein received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1950 for his research in the field of corticoids . Todd, who was involved in the synthesis of vitamin B12 , also received the Nobel Prize. Marguerite Steiger published 18 articles with Reichstein from 1934 to 1939, but had to give up her university career after the outbreak of the Second World War .

As early as 1934, together with Hermine Raths, she had acquired the old Elefanten pharmacy in Zurich, where the pharmacist Gertrud Brandenberger also worked, and in 1937 the two women founded Opopharma AG, which was the sole distributor for products from the Dutch Organon NV and after the war cooperated with partner companies from Europe, the USA and Australia. Steiger and Raths were Swiss pioneers in the field of pharmaceutical distribution; her Opopharma AG temporarily employed around 190 people and had a turnover of more than 80 million francs. In the 1950s, companies such as Oryx Pharmazeutika AG, Esquire AG, Galimedica AG, Schweizerhaus AG, ASSAF Ltd., Wyberg Apotheke AG and Polymed GmbH joined Opopharma AG. In 1973 the neighboring drugstore was added to the parent company, the Elefanten-Apotheke, which was closed together with the pharmacy in 1994 after the death of the two women. All subsidiaries were sold by 2007.

Opo Foundation

As the legal successor of the two company founders, the Opo Foundation, established in 1985, inherited their assets. She promotes scientific projects and in 2005 published the biography of Marguerite Steiger and Hermine Raths. The book with the title You just have to make something out of it. The life's work of Marguerite Steiger and Hermine Raths was written by the historian Martin Schmid. The annual Raths-Steiger lecture in the old Semper observatory also commemorates Marguerite Steiger and Hermine Raths . The house to the red eagle at Kirchgasse 42, which was temporarily the seat of Opopharm AG, was renovated by the foundation, as was the Villa Garbald, which is used as a branch of the ETH Zurich.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Investigation of sugars with a ribose configuration" by Marguerite Steiger, doi : 10.3929 / ethz-a-000092411
  2. ↑ Entry of the "Opo-Stiftung" in the commercial register of the Canton of Zurich  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / zh.powernet.ch  
  3. ^ Opo Foundation - female donors
  4. ^ "A city palace renovation and a book" , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , September 13, 2005
personal data
SURNAME Steiger, Marguerite
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich-Unterstrass
DATE OF DEATH December 10, 1990
Place of death Zurich-Unterstrass