 Hieber, who was since 1934 the Director of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the Technical University Munich published in four decades 249 papers on metal carbonyl chemistry.Also in the 1930s Walter Reppe, an industrial chemist and later board member of the BASF, discovered a number of homogeneous catalytic processes, such as the hydrocarboxylation, in which olefins or alkynes react with carbon monoxide and water to form products such as unsaturated acids and their derivatives.In these reactions, for example, nickel tetracarbonyl or cobalt carbonyls act as catalysts.