Adventures of a chemist collector

the long version

Born in Vienna, Alfred Bader fled to England at the age of fourteen, ten months before the outbreak of World War II. Although a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, he was interned in 1940, along with other 'enemy aliens', and sent to a Canadian prisoner-of-war camp. Obtaining his release in 1941, he was accepted at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he studied engineering chemistry. There followed a fellowship in organic chemistry at Harvard. He worked in Milwaukee as a research chemist for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company and in 1951 co-founded Aldrich, which today, as Sigma-Aldrich, is the world's largest supplier of research chemicals. He spent forty years building Aldrich's distinctive reputation, and the extraordinary story of how he was eventually thrown off the board of Sigma-Aldrich will be of key interest to people in the chemical industry worldwide, as well as to students of business. After leaving Sigma-Aldrich, he continued a fruitful career as an art collector and dealer, and he has some very pertinent and amusing things to say about his experiences in the art world.