Vision, science, passion and freedom – Men who shaped the history of Boehringer Ingelheim

“I commend my assistant Georg Scheuing to manage the Boehringer Scientific Department” – this advice by Nobel Prize Winner Heinrich Wieland started the extraordinarily fruitful and pioneering cooperation between the scientist and the company. From 1924 onwards, Scheuing shaped the scientific path of Boehringer “with his expertise and a great deal of inner passion” as Ernst Boehringer described his employee. Continuing the work of his teacher, Scheuing pushed forward the research on the industrial synthesis of plant alkaloids like lobelin, theophylline and caffeine. These naturally occurring components and their derivatives have an activating effect on respiration and were used as analeptic for asthma and other respiratory diseases. Scheuing succeeded in the fully synthetic production of lobelin in 1936, thus laying the foundation for the company’s outstanding capabilities in the field of respiratory diseases and a successful product.

The joint success story of Scheuing and Boehringer Ingelheim is an early proof how beneficial it can be for a company to leverage scientific expertise:  Scheuing was later praised as a “defender of academic spirit that made achievements and genuine progress a prerequisite for new developments”. His contribution to science lives on in the Georg Scheuing Foundation of the Science Faculty of Mainz University.