Munich

Shrinking asset: Munich's Deutsches Museum. Credit: DEUTSCHES MUSEUM

Publicly funded research at Germany's six largest science and history museums —including the Deutsches Museum in Munich — is to be cut next year by at least 7.5 per cent.

Areas likely to be immediately affected at the Munich museum include its efforts to promote the public understanding of science, for which it has recently taken on responsibility for nationwide coordination.

Some of the biological research at the Zoological Research Institute and Museum Alexander Koenig in Bonn would be “paralysed” by the threatened cuts, according to Michael Schmitt, a biological researcher there. “It would mean the end of my research project on the phylogeny of Chrysomelidae [leaf beetles],” he says.

The museums' research departments form part of the Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (WGL) — formerly called the ‘blue list’ — a loose association of 82 research and service institutes that makes up Germany's ‘fourth pillar’ of non-university research.

The WGL is funded equally by the federal government and Germany's 16 Länder (states), as are the Max Planck Society (MPS) and the university funding organization, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

The MPS and DFG will see their budgets increased next year. But the science museums are not being exempted from an overall decrease of DM30 billion ($16 million) in public spending imposed by finance minister Hans Eichel to reduce the national debt.

“This is a clear [act of] discrimination against the WGL, and science museums in particular,” says an official of the Bund-Länder-Kommission für Bildungsplanung und Forschungsförderung (BLK), which coordinates regional and federal research policies.

The WGL already faces the problem that responsibility for funding its institutes is spread over ten ministries. As for the science museums, funding responsibility shifted last year from the Ministry of the Interior to the new Ministry of Cultural and Media Affairs.

Culture minister Michael Naumann has announced that the cuts will be imposed equally across all spending areas of his ministry. With a relatively small portfolio of DM1.7 billion, Naumann says that he cannot prioritize some areas by excluding them from the cuts. In contrast, the research ministry has been able to respond more flexibly by shifting its priorities.

Research costing DM46.2 million is being carried out at the six science museums this year. Germany's science council, the Wissenschaftsrat, has confirmed the high quality of the museums' research departments, and recommended that the proportion of research to other museum activities should be maintained.

But the 7.5 per cent cut will hit the museums hard. “The cuts come at a time when we had been about to expand our activities,” says Helmuth Trischler, director of science and vice-director-general of the Deutsches Museum. “As a consequence, we will not be able to do what we intended to.”