The academic-industrial symbiosis in German chemical research, 1905–1939

Abstract

It is commonly asserted that the German chemical industry achieved world leadership during the late nineteenth century in large part because it was the first to develop a truly symbiotic relationship with German academic chemists-i.e., a close, mutually profitable cooperation on many levels. Yet many aspects of that cooperation and the origins of industrial research itself remain obscure, their details only beginning to emerge from industrial and academic archives. 1 Despite a few useful earlier studies, until recently the development of the academic-industrial symbiosis after 1914 was even more obscure.2 Critical developments in the shaping and reshaping of the symbiosis occurred in four periods: the decade before World War I; the later war years and postwar crisis from 1916 to 1923; the political-economic crisis years from 1929 to 1933; and finally the Nazi years after 1933. The characteristic results of these changes, which extended the institutional scope of the academic-industrial symbiosis, were the creation of academic-style research laboratories with substantial industrial support during the first period; the emergence of industrially-funded organizations to support chemical literature and educational institutions (as well as research) during the second period; the cutting-back of support for such organizations, along with contractual subsidies for individual academic chemists, during the third period, while the LG. Farben monopoly moved to