A new building will mark the new forum's start.Frankfurt institutes for Advanced Studies (FIAS)

Some of the senior players behind an internationally renowned series of interdisciplinary science workshops and publications have decided to strike out on their own with a new organization.

The former programme director of the troubled Berlin-based Dahlem Conferences has resurfaced at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), in Frankfurt, Germany, as one of the founders of the new FIAS Forum. The new body is "based on the format and philosophy of the original Dahlem Workshop Model", the group says, and will focus on the life sciences.

The Dahlem Conferences programme has organized some 90 international multidisciplinary conferences since 1974, and was integrated into the Free University Berlin in 1990. Troubles with the association surfaced publicly in early 2005, when several senior scientists threatened to resign from the Dahlem board in protest at the firing of programme director Julia Lupp by Free University administrators (see 'University dispute puts Berlin science meetings in crisis'). The protesting board members also alleged that Free University administrative actions had slowed down the publication of manuscripts and undermined Dahlem's independent scientific integrity.

By May 2005, Lupp had been reinstated, reporting to a new Dahlem scientific director. But widespread dissatisfaction with the Free University administrators lingered, and seven board members resigned. Lupp also left Dahlem and is now in Frankfurt as FIAS Forum programme director.

Fresh forum

Wolf Singer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and a driving force behind the FIAS Forum, told Nature that he had initially tried to obtain new financing and international scientific support for the Dahlem Conferences. "But it did not work," he says. "I felt the Dahlem Conferences was not what it used to be, so I started looking for financing for a new forum."

A new FIAS building will be constructed this summer on Campus Riedberg, Frankfurt University's Science Campus, to house biologists, chemists, neuroscientists, physicists and computer scientists, Wolf says. "It is a boiling think-tank of theoreticians who work on different models," he adds.

The Dahlem workshops will continue as usual, says Goran Krstin, spokesman for Free University president, Dieter Lenzen. "Preparations for the next three workshops have already begun." The next workshop will be held in November this year, with two scheduled so far in 2008, he says. This should end a short hiatus; there have been no workshops since June 2005 because of various staff reorganizations.

Singer says that the FIAS Forum will have three or four workshops a year with "the same broad focus as the Dahlem workshops". FIAS Workshop Reports will be published in partnership with MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Initial financing for the FIAS Forum will come from a new body, the Ernst Strüngmann Foundation, set up by brothers Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann, who in 2005 sold their stakes in the Hexal pharmaceutical company and its US arm Eon Labs, Inc. to Novartis for $8.3 billion. The details of the FIAS Forum's financing have not yet been finalized. The Forum also will seek additional financing elsewhere.

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