Academic-Industrial Collaboration

Abstract

With these bitter words of self-recrimination, Heinrich Caro responded to Adolf von Baeyer's note of congratulation on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the award of Ph.D. honoris causa to Caro from the University of Munich.1 While Caro acknowledged the importance of the academic-industrial relationship, he also struggled to understand how changing and unfavourable circumstances could cause it to fall apart. It was during the decade commencing 1873, when Caro first began to collaborate with Baeyer, that Caro was most successful in terms of his dyestuff inventions at BASF, and that he made substantial contributions to chemical industry through the creation of a unique network of links with academics. Though Caro's academic network was to collapse in the mid-1880s, the foundations that he laid flourished and endured into the 20th century, evolving smoothly from dyestuffs to pharmaceuticals, then to high-pressure chemistry, synthetic polymers, and, finally, the life sciences.