24小时热门版块排行榜

返回列表

【奖励】本帖被评价1次，作者fegg7502增加金币 1 个

当前主题已经存档。

fegg7502

荣誉版主 (知名作家)

[资源] 【其它】20 Years After the Wall

转自：http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5954/788

Science 6 November 2009:
Vol. 326. no. 5954, pp. 788 - 791
DOI: 10.1126/science.326_788

Prev | Table of Contents | Next
News Focus
20 Years After the Wall:
Aufbau Ost: Max Planck's East German Experiment
Gretchen Vogel

The Max Planck Society's expansion into the former East Germany seeded top science into the region, but challenges remain in making sure the successes take root.

In September and October 1989, thousands of East Germans gathered each Monday evening in the city of Leipzig, chanting, "We are the people!" in peaceful protests against their government. The so-called Monday demonstrations were central to the popular movement that toppled the East German dictatorship, which 20 years ago this week opened its borders and checkpoints in the divided city of Berlin, allowing its citizens to travel west. Today, Leipzig is home to cutting-edge research into what it means to be human. Scientists at the city's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and its Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences are at the forefront of probing how the human mind evolved and works.

When those courageous protesters filled the city streets, Leipzig was a scientific backwater. So how did it achieve its current reputation for research excellence? It's one of the fruits of an ambitious effort by the then–West German Max Planck Society to seed topflight research institutes throughout formerly communist East Germany. Known as Aufbau Ost—the phrase means "building up the East"—the project resulted in 20 new outposts of the society within 7 years, several in fields that had been dormant in Germany for a generation. "It was a chance to do something completely new and to be courageous" in picking research areas, says Peter Gruss, the current Max Planck Society president.

Figure 1

Breakthrough. The opening of the Berlin Wall meant dramatic changes for East German research.

CREDIT: TOM STODDART/GETTY IMAGES

[Larger version of this image]

A decade after the last "Eastern" Max Planck institute was founded, the region draws scientists from around the world to study topics as diverse as human evolution, gravitational physics, and the way cells become organs. Observers agree that the society's expansion has been a success—in that it attracted top-class research to eastern Germany. Within the Max Planck Society, there are no noticeable differences between east and west, says Jonathan Gershenzon, director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena. And he has no trouble recruiting talent, he says: "Students are moving from west to east without any concern. People come—there's no hesitation. In that sense, the wall really has been torn down."

But the success of Max Planck's Aufbau Ost wasn't quick and easy, and it isn't complete. Some of the new institutes struggled for years, particularly those burdened with researchers inherited from the East German system or with founding directors who didn't click. And the overall influence of these research oases hasn't yet spread as far as some had hoped. The region's universities, which after reunification underwent a more gradual reformation than the East German Academies, still lag behind their western counterparts. And eastern Germany's industrial base, which largely started from scratch 2 decades ago, still struggles. "Science is really successful when researchers can see their research reflected in the regional economy," says Hans-Peter Hiepe, who administers the German science ministry's programs for the former East.

Growing pains

In October 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall opened, East and West Germany officially reunited. That marked the start of a swift and fundamental transformation of East Germany's research landscape. Under the unification agreement, the West German Council of Science and Humanities (an official advisory body that evaluates the country's research and higher education systems) undertook a rigorous evaluation of the East German Academy of Sciences, which administered dozens of institutes across the sciences and humanities. Within a year, eastern institutes were dissolved, renamed, or often "filleted" and divided between different West German funding organizations. There was also a short-term effort to support top East German scientists (see sidebar, p. 791).

The Max Planck Society, however, was able to take a longer view. Formed in Germany in 1948, it was West Germany's premier science funding agency after World War II. By 1989, it was running 60 institutes, each led by a handful of directors who receive lifetime appointments and steady funding. The society receives a government-allocated budget but retains the freedom to set its own research agenda, using working groups of current directors to come up with ideas for new institutes.

Figure 2

Human power. Hundreds of thousands gathered in Leipzig's famous "Monday demonstrations," which helped topple the East German regime. Today the city is a major center of research.

CREDIT: CHRIS NIEDENTHAL/TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

[Larger version of this image]

After the 1989 revolution, initial proposals suggested that the society should thin out its ranks in West Germany to help populate the East, says Andreas Trepte, who helped coordinate Max Planck's Aufbau Ost programs and today works with the society's outreach programs. (A resident of Leipzig in 1989, Trepte participated in the Monday demonstrations.) But the society's president at the time, Hans Zacher, convinced politicians that the current level of research funding in West Germany should be a benchmark—and that the society should expand in proportion to the reunited country's new population.

Keeping with Max Planck tradition, existing directors proposed and debated the focus or theme of each new institute. Working groups looked for areas in which German research was weak, such as anthropology and earth sciences, "or at the absolute interface bridging disciplines," says Gruss, who at the time was a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. Within 7 years, the East had 18 Max Planck institutes, one subinstitute, and one research unit. The society did receive 5% budget increases for nearly a decade to fund the expansion, but it still meant significant belt-tightening in the West, where institutes faced flat budgets for several years and four were ultimately closed.

The first two eastern society outposts—the Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and the Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Berlin—were started in 1991. Both took over researchers and topics from institutes in the East German Academy of Sciences. The Council of Science and Humanities in its evaluation had found that the East German researchers there had enough potential to join the Max Planck ranks.

Taking them aboard wasn't painless, says Helmuth Möhwald, one of the original directors at the Colloids and Interfaces center. Although the academy scientists were doing fine work, they often didn't fit into the research plans of the new directors, he says. In his department of 130, "there were at least 30 or 40 who didn't belong but had to be kept working somehow; ... there were too many to simply let them all go," Möhwald says. To make matters worse, the institute was housed in antiquated labs and was split between two locations in East Berlin. The early years "were the worst professional time of my life," Möhwald says, and he often regretted taking the job.

Gradually, Möhwald recalls, he and his imported colleagues found "soft solutions" as they trimmed their staff. "Not more than two out of 100 ended up jobless," he says. The original academy scientists who stayed, he says, were well-trained and highly motivated, and the early hardships started to pay off. In 1999, the institute moved to a state-of-the-art building in Golm, a village just outside Potsdam. When the Council of Science and Humanities evaluated chemistry departments at universities and institutes across Germany in 2007, the departments in Golm were among a handful that received top marks. And earlier this year, Möhwald's fellow director, Markus Antonietti, received a prestigious Advanced Grant from the European Research Council—one of just two dozen German researchers to do so.

Beyond Germany

Formula The fall of the Berlin Wall is the most potent symbol of the revolutionary events that took place in 1989 in the former Eastern bloc, but Europe's transformation went far beyond Germany's borders. That year's downfall of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, for example, brought tremendous change to Romania—and to its research landscape (Science, 21 November 2008, p. 1184). In addition to the stories here on Germany, Science Careers takes a look online at current science opportunities in Eastern Europe, profiling young researchers and examining programs that promote cooperation between the economically challenged region and wealthier counterparts in Western Europe and throughout the world.

New starts

The directors who started Max Planck Society institutes from scratch had an easier time. "It is one of the most fantastic things that has happened in my life," says anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which began work in 1997. "Building a department up from scratch, the way you want, with the techniques and people you've only dreamed of—it is an extremely rare chance in science." Another director at the institute, linguist Bernard Comrie, agrees. "This was a once-in-a-lifetime offer," he says.

That particular Leipzig institute was an unusual chance for the Max Planck Society as well. For more than half a century, anthropology had largely been a taboo subject in Germany. Until the 1930s, Germany produced some of the world's most influential anthropologists, says Hublin, but "the Nazi regime and the World War almost completely killed the field." It's risen from the ashes in Leipzig. After just a few years, the institute, which now employs nearly 500 people, "has been called the mecca of evolutionary anthropology by some of our colleagues," Hublin says.

Hublin's new scientific home in Leipzig (he was recruited from France) was also an experiment in interdisciplinary research. The five directors—Hublin, Comrie, primatologist Christophe Boesch, psychologist Michael Tomasello, and molecular geneticist Svante Pääbo—come from very different fields, but together they have managed to build a coherent institute. The resulting mix of ideas has led to unexpected projects, Pääbo says, such as looking for the genetic basis of domestication in dogs and rats. "If I had been at an institute of molecular genetics, these are not things I would have been exposed to," he says.

None of the directors at the Evolutionary Anthropology institute is a German citizen. That's not unusual among the Aufbau Ost institutes; nearly two-thirds of the society's directors in the East come from outside Germany. In some cases, such as evolutionary anthropology, Germany had few experts to choose from.

Often, however, foreigners were less intimidated than West German scientists by the so-called Wild East, with its gray, crumbling cities and its society undergoing a wrenching transition from a repressive socialist regime to a democracy with a market-driven economy. "This was the first time in history that a Max Planck offer wasn't as attractive for Germans" as for outsiders, says American ecologist Ian Baldwin, director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena.

When Baldwin and another American, biochemist Gershenzon, came to Germany for their recruiting visit, their hosts allowed them "barely 24 hours" in Jena, Gershenzon says. "What I only later realized was that the people who showed us around—West German scientists—would not have taken the job we were being offered." Once back in Tübingen, in Germany's prosperous southwest, their hosts relaxed visibly. "Over a beer one evening they said, ‘You know, in 30 years Jena could look a bit like Tübingen,’" Gershenzon laughs. "But that wasn't what we were looking for." To him, moving to Jena was exotic and exciting instead of daunting.

That excitement carried over into the scientists' work. "In the first weeks I was here, I almost couldn't sleep," says Hublin. "I would often go in at 4 a.m. There was so much excitement I couldn't stay still."

The chemistry didn't always work as well as it did in Leipzig. At the Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, also founded in 1997, two of the three founding directors had left by 2004, along with three other professor-level scientists. Personal strains proved to be too much, especially for two-scientist couples for whom the only local career option was to work in the same institute, with one spouse supervising the other. And disagreements between directors didn't help. "There was increasing friction in the whole organization of the institute," says ecologist Ernst-Detlef Schulze, the one founding director who remained. He says the former East German location isn't to blame, however. "The whole thing would have crashed in the West, too," he says. Originally, there had been plans to have as many as five directors, he says, "but that did not materialize. We simply had too many internal problems. ... We were set back, kept busy refilling positions."

The institute, most agree, is now on firmer footing. "It's an example of an institute that needed two starts," says Baldwin, who observed the difficulties up close while the two Jena institutes shared a building as new labs were under construction. "A lot of times it works, but when that special chemistry doesn't occur, it can go sour." The growing pains were something new for the Max Planck Society, Baldwin says. "It was the first time in the history of the Max Planck that people wanted to leave the society," he says. Given that the organization hired nearly 60 directors in less than a decade, "if something like that hadn't happened, you would almost have to say that the Max Planck didn't take enough risks," says Wilhelm Krull, secretary general of the Volkswagen Foundation in Hannover, who worked at the German Science Council from 1987 until 1993 and at Max Planck headquarters from 1993 until 1995.

Heidelberg East

On balance, Krull says, the brand-new institutes in the former East Germany have panned out well: "You can see that in some areas, starting from scratch and setting up something with an international reputation really helped to put these spots on the map."

One of those bright spots, Krull says, is Dresden. The city, once dubbed "the valley of the clueless" because it was cut off from West German television and radio signals, is now the leading research center in the former East. It is home to three new Max Plancks: the Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, the Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, and the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. The latter lured four researchers from Heidelberg, home to one of Germany's best universities and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, to start over in Dresden. The four directors from Heidelberg—Kai Simons, Wieland Huttner, Marino Zerial, and Anthony Hyman—along with a fifth director, Jonathan Howard of the University of Washington, Seattle, decided to forgo having "departments" of scientists who answered to them and instead gave younger colleagues the chance to help guide the institute. The model, a significant departure from the traditional Max Planck setup, has worked well, Simons says.

"The real question mark in our equation when we moved," Simons notes, "was could we recruit Ph.D. students and postdocs?" Less than a decade later, the answer seems to be yes. This year, the institute was named the top place to work as a biology postdoc in an international survey commissioned by The Scientist magazine. "Within a few years, they've managed to make Dresden almost like Heidelberg," says Krull.

Dresden may also be the clearest success story in terms of Aufbau Ost institutes having a spinoff effect on the region. The Max Planck institutes there are now surrounded by several related research institutes, and more than two dozen technology start-ups have sprung up in the region. The society's institutes have served as a "crystallization core," says Gruss. "It's a wonderful example of how science can drive business." In the country's recent Excellence Initiative, which offered universities a chance to get extra funding in a bid to boost a few to world-class status (Science, 20 October 2006, p. 400), the Dresden University of Technology received funding for two of its projects, both cooperative efforts with the neighboring Max Planck institutes. It was the only university in the former East outside of Berlin to do as well.

Cooperation counts

In western Germany, relations between Max Planck and universities have often been strained, frequently characterized by rivalry. That hasn't been the case with the new institutes in Dresden and elsewhere. "It is something that is very striking in Leipzig compared to Munich," says Pääbo, who was a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich before moving to Leipzig. "Here we are much more cooperative and open with the university."

The good relations are partly the result of the society's overall effort to repair historical rifts. In 1999, it began a new program of International Max Planck Research Schools throughout Germany. Students in the interdisciplinary graduate programs study at the cooperating university and can do research at a Max Planck institute. "It makes it a whole lot easier to integrate the institutes with the university and get away from the castle concept that had led to the jealousies and animosities" common in the west, Baldwin says.

However, the relatively weak showing of eastern universities overall in Germany's Excellence Initiative worries many observers. Although the new Max Planck institutes themselves are producing good science, the overall research landscape around them is not yet strong enough to stand on its own, says Hiepe. "It is as though you've just moved into a beautiful new house, the envy of all the neighbors. But soon you discover that the foundation is made of matchsticks," he says.

"There is still a lot to be done to make eastern Germany more competitive," Krull agrees. Most important, he says, the universities "need extra money, resources, and infrastructure." And time is running short, Hiepe says. The eastern states within Germany have received extra infrastructure funding from the European Union for 2 decades, but that runs out in 2013. And the German "solidarity pact" that has transferred billions of tax dollars to development projects in the East will also phase out by 2019. The research institutes and the universities of the region have to continue to pull together, Hiepe says. The institutes "have to realize that their future is dependent on the university and local companies also doing well," he says.

Schulze, for one, is in the East for the long term. He retired in September, but he and his wife will stay in Jena, he says. His three children, who grew up in West Germany, all migrated east with their parents. "My son decided to study engineering in Dresden, my elder daughter has a job in Potsdam, and the other has a job in Jena," he says. "We are very happy to be here. We won't move back to the west."

The editors suggest the following Related Resources on Science sites:
In Science Magazine

NEWS FOCUS
20 Years After the Wall
Why So Few East German Directors?
Gretchen Vogel (6 November 2009)
Science 326 (5954), 791. [DOI: 10.1126/science.326_791]
| Summary » | Full Text » | PDF »

NEWS FOCUS
20 Years After the Wall: Profile: Hübner Family
Big Dreams Come True
Andrew Curry (6 November 2009)
Science 326 (5954), 792. [DOI: 10.1126/science.326_792]
| Summary » | Full Text » | PDF »

[ Last edited by fegg7502 on 2009-11-12 at 17:51 ]

回复此楼