Munich

Markl: new institutes and fresh research.
Pääbo: neighbours spark new interests.

Shortly after the Wende, as Germans call the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Max Planck Society (MPS) made itself unpopular by refusing to join other research organizations in their rush to rescue good scientists by taking over their research institutes.

The society wanted to stick to its principle — the so-called Harnack principle — that institutes should be created in scientific areas that balance its overall portfolio, and that each institute should be built around the research of prominent scientists recruited from around the world. At the time the society ran about 60 institutes in west Germany.

The society mitigated some of the criticisms it received by creating, at a total cost of DM200 million, 27 temporary research groups within universities, each headed by an east German scientist. The universities hosting the groups agreed to take over the support of each professor and at least part of his or her research group after the end of the MPS's five-year funding period.

Opening new territory

Drawing up clear contracts with the universities made all the difference to the success of this programme, whose aim was to help reintegrate research into universities. All the professors were taken into faculty, in contrast to the government-sponsored WIP programme, which had the same aim, but was less successful (see page 635).

In parallel, the society planned more thoughtfully the directions of 20 new institutes. “We chose themes that extended our research areas — for example, for the first time we set up an engineering institute — and took the opportunity to create institutes in particularly exciting new areas of research,” says Hubert Markl, MPS president.

“But in a few cases we continued some of the very good research of the DDR, for example the microstructure-physics work in Halle, in innovative directions.”

The MPS ventured into areas of research — such as cognition and evolutionary anthropology — that would have been unthinkable for Germans in the decades after the Second World War, with sensitivities to the abuse of biology very high. Demographic research was also a particularly sensitive area into which the MPS ventured.

“It is perhaps helpful that the directors of our new Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock are foreigners, and better able to lead discussions which we can't avoid anyway,” says Markl.

The proportion of foreign research directors in MPS institutes in east Germany — 40 per cent of the total — is twice as high as in the west. This was a deliberate move, says Markl, “to signal that we do not represent the colonizing power of Wessies [west Germans], but an opening up of the scientific future in Germany as a whole”.

The MPS also took pains to consider new approaches to research, putting together groups from different scientific areas in the same institute to promote interdisciplinary working. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has departments for developmental and comparative psychology, evolutionary genetics, linguistics and primatology, for example.

“It's hard to say how far physical proximity will help generate genuinely new interdisciplinary ideas,” says Svante Pääbo, one of the institute's research directors. “But already my interest in chimp evolutionary genetics has been sparked.”