New champion for basic research

The Max Planck Society is one of Europe’s most prestigious science funding agencies, but the new president, molecular biologist Peter Gruss, faces a tough challenge ahead with growing competition for research funds and the changing European and international landscape of research. Based in Germany, but with links in other European countries and beyond, the Max Planck Society (MPS) was established in 1948 following on from the prewar Kaiser Wilhelm Society. “Germany actually had a lot of help from the British in getting it going”, says Gruss. “The basic aim was to produce effective mechanisms to complement university research”, he says. The MPS primarily promotes research in its own institutes. These carry out basic research in areas of the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. In particular the MPS aims to take up new and promising subjects in research that universities are unable to accommodate. Gruss, as president, represents the MPS and lays down the guidelines for its scientific policy and is elected by the senate of the society. The MPS is not a government body. “It is essential above all that we retain our autonomy,” says Gruss. The current budget is 1.2 billion euros. Of this, 95 per cent comes equally from the federal government and the individual states. The MPS has 11,200 employees of which around 3,000 are scientists and a further 8,000 people are students or postdoctoral fellows. However, the budget represents just two per cent of the total expenditure for research and development in Germany. And it is the battle over this share which now looms for the MPS. Maintaining the ability to move rapidly into new research areas remains one of the key goals of the MPS. But this has a tough downside: the society must also exercise its muscle to close down areas of research either considered to have reached their goals, or if directors are no longer available or if universities are considered to be in a position to take on the research. Over the past decade the MPS has demonstrated just such muscle. Since the early 1990s, four institutes and one subinstitute have been closed, and three institutes and a number of departments have shifted their research focus completely. In News focus