Laureano Calderón y Arana

Laureano Calderón y Arana (Madrid, 4 July 1847 – Madrid, 4 March 1894)

After the by the , 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 , in the in A Coruña, after a Royal Order dated 12 April 1875.

Chemical laboratory of Saez, Utor and Soler in 1868, before being acquired by Calderón, , Madrid, in El Museo Universal.

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. an event that has been associated with the beginning of biochemistry in Spain, although others assign the merit to , 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 . Current headquarters of the Real Academia Nacional de Farmacia on Calle de la Farmacia —formerly "Calle de San Juan"—, former location of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Central University.