Laureano Calderón Arana

Laureano Calderón y Arana (Madrid, 4 July 1847 – Madrid, 4 March 1894) was a Spanish chemist, pharmacist, physicist and crystallographer, brother of the also scientist Salvador Calderón and of the journalist Alfredo Calderón y Arana. Associated with the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, he was the inventor of an instrument for crystallographic studies called the «estauróscopo» and one of the pioneers in the study and teaching of biochemistry in Spain.

Biography Son of Antonio María Calderón, native of Campuzano, Province of Santander, and of María Ignacia Arana de Barrenechea, native of Usúrbil; he was born in Madrid on 4 July 1847. He had as brothers Alfredo, who was born three years later, in 1850, and Salvador. Disciple of Manuel Rioz y Pedraja, he graduated in Pharmacy in 1866 at the Central University; he soon won, by competition, the position of assistant and auxiliary in the Faculty of Pharmacy of said institution. After competitions he held in 1874, he obtained the chair of Organic chemistry at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He has been noted for his inclusion, during the 1870s, in a group of followers of Darwinist lines of thought, called "novísimo movement of natural philosophy", a term apparently coined by his brother Alfredo, among whom, in addition to Laureano Calderón, were the scientists Augusto González de Linares, Odón de Buen, his other brother —Salvador—, Blas Lázaro Ibiza, Enrique Serrano Fatigati or José Rodríguez Carracido. He was a follower of the ideas of Julián Sanz del Río and Francisco Giner de los Ríos, having been described as their "disciple".

After the measures taken by the Marquis of Orovio, Minister of Development, regarding Public Instruction, the protests of Calderón in defense of academic freedom —branded as "energetic" and "vehement"— caused him to be imprisoned, together with Augusto González de Linares, in the Castle of San Antón in A Coruña, after a Royal Order dated 12 April 1875.

Having obtained freedom, although stripped of his chair, he moved to Paris, deciding to expatriate himself; there he became a disciple of Marcellin Berthelot, whom he helped in his studies of chemical synthesis and whose works on thermochemistry he continued later. Later he emigrated to Germany, where he studied crystallography with Paul von Groth, in Strasbourg, In this stay in both countries he also worked with Claude Bernard, Éleuthère Mascart or Felix Hoppe-Seyler. Calderón devised an instrument for crystallographic studies that was named «estauróscopo». After his experiences abroad, he returned to Spain, in 1880. Considered one of the creators of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza —his protests against the Marquis of Orovio, together with those of other professors, giving rise to the birth of this— and a "prestigious man of science of the Institution", he was in fact included in the list of professors of the ILE, but never came to exercise as such. His chair was not restored until 3 March 1881, when the Minister of Development José Luis Albareda declared his rights reinstated. Member of some foreign scientific societies, he was part of the International Commission for the reform of chemical nomenclature and honorary positions were granted to him in various scientific congresses he attended. According to José Gutiérrez Abascal, "Laureano Calderón was much better known as an eminent chemist abroad, and especially in Germany and France, than in Spain".

He had a laboratory installed on Calle de Carretas, acquired in 1880 and originally founded by Saez, Utor and Soler, where analyses of various substances were carried out, including urine. In 1884 he was asked to study the industrial exploitation of the Laguna de Fuente Piedra, proposing the installation of a fertilizer factory; he was promoter of the Compañía Agrícola Salinera, whose direction was entrusted to him and which worked in the production of superphosphates. In 1884 he gave a notable speech at the Ateneo de Madrid —institution of whose Section of Natural Sciences he was president, re-elected, for a period of three years— on the occasion of the inauguration of the new building of the institution, in which Calderón expressed "his firm conviction that the new science of thermodynamics provided the foundational basis to solve the pressing problems of society".

In 1888 he was granted the chair of Biological Chemistry and Critical History of Pharmacy at the Central University of Madrid, an event that has been associated with the beginning of biochemistry in Spain, although others assign the merit to Carracido, later than Arana. In 1892 he gave the speech La química descriptiva y la química racional at the Central University, as the opening of the academic year. He was the author of Los explosivos y pólvoras sin humo, a work he did not live to see published; in this sense his not very outstanding research activity has been negatively underlined and that he did not translate foreign works, in fact, according to Francisco Javier Puerto, conservative historiography would have labeled him as "disseminator", despising his scientific work. He died on 4 March 1894 in Madrid at the age of forty-six, and was buried in the civil cemetery of the city.

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