The Sandoz side was so stuffy that managers worked all day with their office doors shut.
"Vaucanson was in the market of ideas, "says Bernard Pin, curator of the Sandoz exhibition.
There are several in the Sandoz collection, and similar ones come up periodically at auction.
As head of the natural products division at Sandoz, he revelled in its potential for psychiatry.
ECONOMIST: Albert Hofmann, chemist, died on April 29th, aged 102
Sandoz chemists discovered Zelmac serendipitously in the late 1980s while looking for chemicals that might improve memory.
Early in the 20th Century, much of the best material returned, acquired by collectors like Maurice Sandoz.
In 1996 the Sandoz family backed Parmigiani in a venture to sell watches under his own name.
The American authorities similarly imposed tough conditions on the merger of two Swiss drug firms, Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz.
Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy were plodding, risk-averse and assiduously Swiss companies that often got trounced by faster, fiercer U.S. rivals.
Its Sandoz generics subsidiary produces generic drugs as well as active pharmaceutical ingredients.
In 1992 he took a job at Sandoz headquarters in Basel, and by 1995 he was running the pharmaceuticals unit.
Scientists at Sandoz and Ciba had produced plenty of good ideas, but the companies had faltered in getting them to the market.
In 1988 he joined Sandoz by leveraging a family connection: His wife was the niece of Sandoz's chairman at the time, Marc Moret.
The deal moves Novartis above Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, an Israeli firm, to become the world's leading maker of generic drugs through its Sandoz division.
One of the few Ethiopian Caterpillars not owned by an institution--the Fondation Sandoz has two of them--was auctioned by Sotheby's last year for 404, 500 CHF.
Despite the turmoil, the Novartis board chose to offer Vasella, who oversaw the merger between Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz that created Novartis, an eye-popping amount of money.
FORBES: The Novartis Board Insulted Shareholders With Hush Money For Dan Vasella
And Hassan, who has taken credit for turnarounds of divisions at Sandoz and Wyeth and all of Pharmacia, is once again fighting his way out of a corner.
The son of a woman's rights activist and Pakistan's first ambassador to India, he had grandly turned around divisions at Sandoz and Wyeth and the whole of Pharmacia.
By the '40s, four eggs were in the hands of Maurice Sandoz, heir to the Sandoz pharmaceuticals fortune, whose collection of antique automata--clockwork animals and humans--was to become one of the finest ever assembled.
As he worked in the Sandoz research laboratory in Basel in Switzerland on April 16th 1943, isolating and synthesising the unstable alkaloids of the ergot fungus, Albert Hofmann began to feel a slight lightheadedness.
ECONOMIST: Albert Hofmann, chemist, died on April 29th, aged 102
Sandoz recently reported that its sales in the six biggest such markets were 14% higher in the first half than they were a year ago, while sales in Europe edged up by barely 3%.
Hassan turned around divisions at Wyeth and Sandoz.
FORBES: $9 Billion Bausch & Lomb Sale Mints New Turnaround Artist
One of the most successful mergers in pharmaceuticals, between Sandoz and Ciba Geigy to form Novartis, was between two firms whose closeness of approach was the greater for being based in the same Swiss town (and doubtless run by chaps who had done national service together).
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