The Max Planck Society

What were the reasons for the hesitant progress of modern genetics in Germany after World War II The reconstruction of the Max Planck Society (MPS) on the ruins of the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes reflects the development of research and technology in general and of molecular genetics in particular, in relation to public and political support. 

The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Sciences (MPS) is an independent, non-profit research organization. It was established on February 26, 1948, as the successor organization of the former Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Max Planck Institutes conduct basic research in service to the general public in the areas of natural science, social science and the arts and humanities. 

Following the collapse of the Third Reich, for German science, as for many sectors of public life, the need for a new start was essential. The state of Germany s institutions at the end of the war corresponded to the general chaos accompanying the defeat. The various institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS) originally founded in 1911, the predecessor of the Max Planck Society, were damaged or housed provisionally at different evacuation sites. The years of 

The 1950s were years in which the first steps towards a hmited scientific restructuring could be undertaken. For instance, the MPS addressed itself to new research topics, such as behavioral psychology, chemistry of cells, aeromony and astrophysics, nuclear or plasma physics, or concentrated on issues already being pursued such as virus research or physical chemistry. Scientific cooperation beyond Germany s borders was extended step by step. Particularly high expectations accompanied the establishment of contacts between scientists of the MPS and those of Israel s Weizmann Institute in 1959. 

The age of biotechnology started in the USA with the foundation of the first biotech company. Genentech was founded by the renowned biochemist Herbert Boyer and the young visionary venture capitalist Robert Swanson. (Of the 

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Self-organisation is a property of complex systems these are an important area of physics and have been studied intensively in the last few years. Since 1993, the Max Planck Society has had an institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden. This is an interdisciplinary research area, dealing with problems which span the range from the cosmos to the living cell. 

Acknowledgements I thank Prof. Dr. Stefan Schulz for the invitation to write this review. Prof. Wilhelm Boland is gratefully acknowledged for support during the preparation of this manuscript. I thank Emily Wheeler, Dr. Martin Heil, Janine Rattke, Dr. Anne Busch, Dr. Uli Lion, Thomas Wichard, Sven Adolph, Theresa Wiesemeier, Christoph Beckmann, and Johann Pohnert for helpful discussion during the preparation of this manuscript. The Max-Planck-Society is acknowledged for funding. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to H. D. Lehmann for his gas-diffusion measurements. We thank C. Burger for help during X-ray analysis, H. Kamuse-witz for contact angle measurements, and S. Forster for the synthesis ofthe PS-b-PBd block copolymers. S. Oestreich wants to thank the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie for a Kekule fellowship. Financial support by the Max-Planck Society is gratefully acknowledged. 

After two further pilot studies in 1967 in New Guinea and 1969 on the upper Ori-noko (Yanomami), the Society agreed in 1970 to let me lead a small working unit which in 1975 became an independent research institution of the Max-Planck-Society. For the cross-cultural documentation I had chosen traditional cultures in different continents with different subsistence strategies ... 

Research Center for Human Ethology in the Max-Planck-Society, D-82346 Andechs... 

Karl Grammer, born 1950, studied biology in Munich and worked for ten years at the Research Center for Human Ethology in the Max-Planck-Society (Andechs, Germany). Recently, he published a book on flirting behaviour. Currently, he is scientific director of the Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute for Urban Ethology. 

Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society Department of Inorganic Chemistry Faradayweg 4-6 14195 Berlin Germany... 

Luc Brunsveid, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology and Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society, Dortmund, Germany... 

Acknowledgments Our apologies to those research laboratories whose work we were unable to cite due to space constrictions. We thank Janet Webster and Jim Tokuhisa for helpful comments on the manuscript. Our work was supported by the US Department of Agriculture (NRI/CSREES-2007-35318-18384), the Thomas and Kate Jeffress Memorial Trust (J-850), and the Max Planck Society. 

Acknowledgements I thank the present and former members of my group for their unsurpassed contribution to om studies on stress and serotonin. I am especially indebted to Ms. Cornelia Flachskamm for her continuous and excellent technical support. The studies of the author described in this chapter have been performed at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Mimich, Germany and have been supported by the Max Planck Society and the Volkswagen Foimdation. 

Otto Hahn, 1879-. President of the Max Planck Society for the Promotion of Science. Discoverer with F. Strassmann, in 1938, of the splitting of uranium and of thorium by neutron irradiation into two elements of medium weight. Discoverer of radioactinium, radiothorium, mesotliorium, uranium Z, and (with Miss Lise Meitner) protactinium. He has devised radioactive methods for determining the geologic and biologic age of materials. In 1945 he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the year 1944. 

The effort necessary for this review and the advances that have been made on poly[2]catenanes would never have been achieved without the help, skills and enthusiasm of Dr. Dirk Muscat, Dr. Werner Kohler, Professor Jean-Marc Kern, Dr. Christiane Dietrich-Buchecker, Dr. Jean-Luc Weidmann, and Dr. J.-P. Sauvage. It is a pleasure for the author to gratefully acknowledge them. Acknowledgments are also due to Professor Klaus Mullen, Professor Xavier Coqueret, Dr. Adelheid Godt, Dr. Satoru Shimada, and Professor Fraser Stoddart for fruitful discussions, and to the Max-Planck Society and European Union for financial support. The author wishes to record his kind appreciation to Ms. Susan Mullins for assistance with proofreading. 

Acknowledgements V.M.S.-P. thanks the EU for a Marie Curie fellowship and the Spanish MEC for a Ramon y Cajal contract and for Grant Number CTQ2007-65310. C.G. thanks the Max Planck Society and the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie for support. 

Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Dr. Ankur Rastogi (Dow Chemicals), Dr. Vincent Mathot (DSM Research) for their contribution in development of the work. One of the authors (S. R.) wishes to thank the Max Planck Society and The Dutch Polymer Institute for the financial support. Experimental support provided by the Materials Science beamline ID11 and Ultra Small Angle beamline ID2 (ESRF, Grenoble) is gratefully acknowledged. 

Professor Wegner was one of the founders of the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research in 1983. He was instrumental in making the Institute an internationally recognized organization in polymer science research, largely by his excellent academic and administrative efforts. He is now the vice-president of the Max-Planck Society. 

We thank the Max Planck Society for generous financial support. M.H. thanks the Max Planck Society for a Minerva postdoctoral fellowship. We thank Dr. C. L. Pereira and Dr. D. Kennedy for the help in editing this chapter. 

Acknowledgement We would like to acknowledge financial support from the German Science foundation (DFG) within the project Adhasion und Mechanik von Polyelektrolyt-Hohlkorpem and the Max Planck Society. We are grateful for stimulating discussions with Prof. Helmuth Mohwald. 

M.-E. Pandelia (Pennsylvania State University, USA) and A. W. Rutherford (Imperial College, London, UK) are gratefully acknowledged for their critical review of the manuscript, and R. Groever and B. Deckers for their extensive help with the text and artwork. The authors own work cited in the manuscript was financially supported by the EU/Energy Network project SOLAR-H2 (FP7 contract 212508) and BMBF (03SF0355C) and the Max Planck Society. 

Special thanks to Genka Tzolova-Miiller and Annette Trunschke, who performed numerous tests on different types of equipment. The Max Planck Society is acknowledged for providing a stipend for GTM. AT was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, project JE 267/2-1. 

The Max Planck Society and the German Science Foundation are thanked for financial support. 

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