Confidence boost

Abstract

Two new Nobel laureates and six new ‘elite’ universities have lifted the spirits of scientists in Germany. Michael Gross reports. Two new Nobel laureates and six new ‘elite’ universities have lifted the spirits of scientists in Germany. Michael Gross reports. For the first time in 34 years, this year's Nobel prizes honoured two German scientists in different disciplines, with the inventor Peter Grünberg receiving half of the physics prize, and the surface chemist Gerhardt Ertl winning the chemistry award all by himself the very next day. In the second half of the twentieth century, Nobel prizes and the lack thereof have been the clearest indicator of the irreversible damage that the Third Reich inflicted on Germany's knowledge base by driving the best brains into exile. In chemistry, for instance, Ertl is the 28th laureate, but half of those prizes were won before 1933, and the last one before his went to structural biochemists Huber, Michl, and Deisenhofer in 1988. Thus, the nearly simultaneous arrival of Ertl's and Grünberg's accolades was interpreted by many as a sign of German science rejoining the leading research nations. The news magazine Der Spiegel ran a cover story on this theme, showing the glass dome of the Berlin Reichstag taking off like a space ship, in a spectacular display of clouds and fire jets. Simultaneously, efforts to create the right environment for future Nobel-winning research efforts have also made a significant step forwards, as the ‘Exzellenzinitiative’, or initiative for excellence, announced the second set of universities and institutes that were considered top rank and will benefit from additional funding of nearly two billion euros until 2011. In the first round announced in 2006, the Exzellenzinitiative crowned the first three elite universities, namely the Technical Universities of Karlsruhe and Munich, and the Ludwigs Maximilian University at Munich. New visionary concepts for integrating research across the traditional organisational structures appear to have been crucial in these decisions made by international advisory panels. For instance, Karlsruhe, a winner in the first round, presented a radical concept to merge the technical university with the neighbouring research centre to form a ‘Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’ or KIT. In the second round, announced last month, the Technical University of Aachen, Free University of Berlin, three historic universities (Göttingen, Heidelberg, Freiburg), and one modern foundation, Konstanz, joined the elite ranks, based on overall institutional strategies for the future. At the same time, 20 excellence clusters and 21 postgraduate schools received shares of the extra funding, many of them involving institutes of the overall prize winners (hosting at least one of each was a requirement for the universities crowned). The Free University of Berlin, for instance, chairs two of the winning schools and two of the clusters, all in the humanities. In biology, Freiburg University presides over a ‘Centre for Biological Signalling Studies’, while Aachen chairs an excellence cluster on ‘Tailor-made Fuels from Biomass’. The main German funding agency, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), had organised the assessment of the schools and clusters, fielding 84 applications, and using 320 expert reviewers, 80 per cent of whom were from abroad. DFG president Matthias Kleiner announced the winners and praised the quality of all entries. “Overall, we can already say, with absolute certainty, that the Excellence Initiative has stimulated significant change in the German higher education and scientific community, and that it will continue to do so,” he said. “We hope, and are confident, that this process will not come to an end once the five years are over, but that the initiative will continue and be developed further.”