Alfred Bader (1) (1924–2018)

Alfred Bader was born in Vienna, Austria. His parents were Elizabeth Countess Serényi, from an aristocratic Catholic Hungarian family, and Alfréd von Bader, of Czech Jewish descent. They had eloped and were spurned by his mother's family afterwards. Alfred was only two weeks old when his father died. He was adopted by his paternal aunt, Gisela Reich, a widow, and raised as a Jew. His older sister Marion remained with their mother. In 1938, at age 13, Bader was sent to the UK via Kindertransport to escape Nazi persecution. His adoptive mother Gisela was deported to the concentration camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt), where she died in 1942. In England, Bader attended Brighton Technical College. In 1940, at the start of World War II, he was sent to Canada to an internment camp for European refugees. He was released 18 months later and taken in by historian and journalist Martin Wolff and his family in Montreal. Bader was accepted at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he received multiple degrees: a B.Sc degree in engineering chemistry in 1945, a B.A. in history in 1946, and an M.S. in chemistry in 1947. While working summers for the Murphy Paint Company in Montreal, Bader was offered financial support to do graduate work, on the condition that he return to work at the company. Bader then went to Harvard University, where he earned his M.A. in organic chemistry in 1949 and his PhD in 1950. By that time, Murphy Paint had been acquired by Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. (PPG) and Bader began work as a research chemist there. His work led to a number of patents. In 1951, while still working at PPG, Bader co-founded the Aldrich Chemical Company, which specialized in supplying reliable chemicals for research purposes. It expanded and moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1958. In 1975, it merged with Sigma Chemical Corporation to become the Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, which Bader grew into a Fortune 500 company and industry leader. He served as company president from 1975 to 1980 and as chairman from 1980 to 1991. That year, he retired and focused on his extensive fine art collection and generous philanthropy. Bader published two volumes of autobiography, Adventures of a Chemist Collector (1995) and Chemistry & Art: Further Adventures of a Chemist Collector (2008).