Vorsprung durch technik

SCIENCE:With two winners among this year's Nobel prize laureates and guaranteed state funding, does Germany have a research edge?

Advertising poster boys are usually pouting young things selling aftershave or underwear. Not so in Berlin last week, where billboards show two ordinary-looking, white-haired men smiling down at passers-by.

Overnight, Peter Grünberg and Gerhard Ertl, this year's Nobel Prize winners in physics and chemistry, have become poster boys for excellence and innovation in German research.

Ertl was recognised for his breakthrough work in surface chemistry, explaining everything from why iron rusts, how fuel cells function and how the catalysts in cars work.

Grünberg's study of magnetic fields in metals enabled the creation of high-density hard drives at the heart of all computers.

The Nobel Prize double-header came as a huge surprise in Germany, reflected in the perplexed headline in one newspaper editorial: "Why are we so good?"

For years, Germany's state-financed research sector has been has portrayed as a lumbering monolith, unable to keep up with the fast-moving world of private research and high-calibre institutions like MIT. But Germany's Nobel Prize winners used their moment in the media spotlight to correct the record.

"German research is sometimes talked down," said Ertl. "But it has no reason to hide itself."

The culture of German research and its researchers is a modest one, but their work is financed by budgets that are anything but modest. Germany spends 2.5 per cent of its €2.59 trillion GDP on research and development and top-level research is dominated by three public research bodies.

The grandest of them all is the Max Planck Society (MPG), named after the German-born father of quantum physics.

With 79 research institutes employing over 12,000 people, including Ertl, its researchers have taken home 17 Nobel Prizes since 1948. The Times Higher Education Supplement ranks MPG as the world's leading non-university scientific research institute.

What makes the MPG unique is not just its annual budget of €1.4 billion, but the fact that this money is guaranteed by law.

The money comes directly from the federal and state budgets each year, meaning that cash-strapped finance ministers cannot raid the MPG's budget.

Guaranteed budgets enable long-term planning and have cultivated a long-view approach to research work.

Grünberg is a classic long-view researcher. During the 1980s, while colleagues worked in fashionable, market-driven projects like the hunt for a super-conducting materials, he beavered away investigating the magnetic behaviour of layers of iron and chrome.

Long after the superconductor hunt was abandoned, Grünberg's research has made it possible to create miniature, high-density hard-drives, changing forever and how people use computers - for storing thousands of photos and hundreds of hours of music and films.

Behind the euphoria of Germany's double Nobel win remains a nagging doubt that the country still lags behind in bringing research to market.

The last century of German research is filled with good ideas - the television, the fax, the hybrid motor - that were all taken and brought to market by other countries.

In light of his work, Grünberg was approached by IBM in 1995 and, with no hard drive production in Germany to speak of, he licensed his discoveries to the American computer company for €10 million.

"German research doesn't have to be ashamed of itself," said Germany's 2005 physics Nobel Prize winner Theodor Hänsch this week, echoing Ertl. "But it needs to sell itself better."

Despite a long tradition of industry-financed research from giants like Siemens, BASF and Krupp, today just 7 per cent of start-ups in Germany come from university departments. In the electronics sector, the number of new start-ups from universities has halved since 1998.

"We had a few attempts at bringing research to market, but they always stuttered as soon as they started," said Wolfgang Helmberg, a polymers researcher at various institutions in Berlin including the MPG. "Mostly, they were suffocated by bureaucracy."

To address this, the Max Planck Society and other research bodies now run incubation institutes to help start-ups.

In addition, the federal government has launched a new third-level research initiative providing an additional €1.9 billion in funding for selected "elite" universities to boost research facilities and education.

At the same time, a new generation of research institutes is emerging in Germany, beginning with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Kit) with an annual research budget of €600 million.

Peter Gruss, president of the Max Planck Society, says there is a need for greater co-operation between researchers and industry.

But, like many German researchers, he sees the Nobel Prizes as a vindication of the German tradition of long-view, fundamental research or "Grundforschung", over privately-funded work driven by short-term market demands.

"With his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein laid the foundation for today's Global Positioning System (GPS)," said Gruss on German national radio. "No GPS technology is possible without Einstein. But I can imagine that no (private) company would have discovered the theory of relativity."

MAX PLANCK SOCIETY NOBEL LAUREATES

2007

Gerhard Ertl

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

For his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces.

2005

Theodor Hänsch

Nobel Prize in Physics

Together with Roy J Glauber and John L Hall for work on development of laser-based precision spectroscopy.

1995

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Nobel Prize in Medicine

Together with Edward B Lewis and Eric F Wieschaus for the discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development.

1995

Paul J Crutzen

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Together with Mario J Molina and F Sherwood Rowland for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone.

1991

Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann

Nobel Prize in Medicine

For their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells.

1988

Robert Huber, Johan Deisen- hofer, Hartmut Michel

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

For the determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre.

1986

Ernst Ruska

Nobel Prize in Physics

For his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope.

1985

Klaus von Klitzing

Nobel Prize in Physics

For the discovery of the quantized Hall effect.

1985

Georges Köhler

Nobel Prize in Medicine

Together with Niels K Jerne and César Milstein, the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies.

1973

Konrad Lorenz

Nobel Prize in Medicine

Together with Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen, for their discoveries concerning organisation and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns.

1967

Manfred Eigen

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Together with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter, for their studies of very fast chemical reactions, effected by the disturbance of equilibrium by means of very short energy pulses.

1964

Feodor Lynen

Nobel Prize in Medicine

Together with Konrad Bloch, for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism.

1963

Karl Ziegler

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Together with Giulio Natta, for discoveries in the field of chemistry and high polymer technology.

1954

Walter Bothe

Nobel Prize in Physics

Together with Max Born, for his coincidence method and his discoveries made with the coincidence circuit.

(Source: Max Planck Society)