Im Schatten der chemischen Synthese: Industrielle Biotechnologie in Deutschland (1900-1970) (review)

Im Schatten der chemischen Synthese: Industrielle Biotechnologie in Deutschland (1900-1970). By Luitgard Marschall. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000. Pp. 384. DM 78.

Although the history of chemical technology and the chemical industry in Germany has received a great deal of attention in recent decades, the same can hardly be said for industrial biotechnology. As Luitgard Marschall's title rightly suggests, the latter has remained very much overshadowed by synthetic chemicals, both in the historical literature and in industry itself. Building on Robert Bud's pioneering 1993 study, The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology, Marschall illuminates the history of German industrial biotechnology up to the 1970s—only to conclude that its obscurity was largely deserved.

Marschall characterizes the developments from the 1880s to the 1970s as "modern biotechnology," characterized by controlled fermentation, as opposed to the "new biotechnology" of genetic engineering (p. 16). She approaches these developments with a mixture of historical survey, analysis, and institutional or corporate case studies, the scope of which was largely determined by the limited availability of archival sources. The first two chapters survey nineteenth-century research and the work of the Institute for Commercial Fermentation in Berlin from 1874 through World War I. This, she argues, was the turning point for German biotechnology. Before the war, it seemed poised to compete with synthetic chemical technologies in areas like bacterial nitrogen fixation (versus chemical fertilizers) and microbiological production of feedstocks for synthetic rubber, ethanol, and other organic chemicals. Yet, despite some wartime successes in producing some critical chemicals such as glycerin, results were mixed. Biotechnological processes depended upon surplus agricultural products for their raw materials. By the middle of the war Germany no longer had an agricultural surplus.

The postwar settlement cost Germany much of her prime eastern land for potatoes, and food shortages continued well into the 1920s. Fermentation technologies thereby fell into disrepute, and biotechnology became a "niche technology." Led by I. G. Farben, the German chemical industry pushed ahead with its established coal- and coal-tar-based synthetic technologies as well as newer high-pressure processes, beginning with the BASF's Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis, which had provided critical supplies of nitrogen during the war. High-pressure synthesis thus became a "winner technology" in Germany, while biotechnology became a "loser technology" (pp. 106, 110). National Socialist autarky brought about a minor renaissance of biotechnology but did not essentially change its niche status. Although Germans continued to be interested in biotechnology, they also associated it with nations having greater agricultural resources.

There was scarcely any noteworthy German innovation in biotechnology before 1945, or in the postwar era before the 1970s. I. G. Farben's thriving successor companies in West Germany showed little interest in it, for reasons that Marschall examines in her central analysis. Here she contrasts the well-known development of innovation in the German dye industry, which made "progressive" use of structural organic chemical science, with the rather retrograde-appearing and largely empirically based processes of biotechnology. This undervaluing of biotechnology by chemists led, however, to serious weaknesses, such as the limited production of penicillin during World War II. Here the Germans put most of their effort into futile attempts to develop an industrial synthetic process and thus had to import the successful American biotechnology after the war.

Marschall confirms this general pattern in her final three chapters, interesting case studies of German firms that used biotechnology to produce lactic acid and citric acid (Boehringer Ingelheim); enzymes (Röhm); and vitamin C, antibiotics, and other organic medicinals (Merck). Ironically, just as chemical giants like Bayer took a renewed interest in biotechnology during the 1970s, two of these firms de-emphasized biotechnology, a development that Marschall plausibly attributes to the dominance of organic chemists in their management and to the failure of biotechnology to develop an academic institutional base comparable to that of organic chemistry.

The book is not without flaws. It...