"Greater than the sum of its parts"

 

1959 the Weizmann Institue of Science invited the first delegation of German scientists to come to Israel. The visit was a milestone for German-Israeli scientific cooperation.

 

What triggered it off for Nadine Töpfer was a six month research period in the Israeli desert, the Negev, where she breathed in foreign air. Having achieved her doctorate, the biophysicist from Potsdam had just one dream: to return to Israel. “I pulled out all the stops,” as she put it. Since October 2014 the postdoc researcher has been at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, researching secondary plant metabolism. Töpfer undertakes computer-based biology, a special discipline still in its infancy as reflected by the large number of publications from Israel.

Like Nadine Töpfer, in the last 50 years thousands of German and Israeli scientists have undertaken doctoral and scientific research. They have spent time –a few weeks, months or years – at a research institute in a partner country in order to familiarize themselves with new approaches in their field of knowledge, learn from their colleagues’ expertise and encounter a different culture. The Weizmann Institute has played a pivotal role, because it was at the invitation of the Israeli institution that the first delegation of German scientists visited Israel in 1959.

The visitors from the Max Planck Society (MPS) saw themselves as bridge builders. Eleven years after the establishment of the State of Israel, considerable resistance was still expressed at cooperation with the Germans, in whose extermination camps millions of Jews had been slaughtered in the Second World War. The German delegation was headed by the president of the MPS, Otto Hahn. At the time the chemist and Nobel laureate was considered reliable in the eyes of his Israeli hosts because in Nazi Germany he had put his own life at risk, saving the lives of a number of Jews.

 

Once the ice had been broken, cooperation came about slowly. As early as 1961, the first German scientist, Lorenz Krüger, was able to go to the Weizmann Institute for an extended research stay. And three years later, in advance of the 1965 establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries, the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel established firm foundations for their research cooperation. Today the Minerva Society, one of the subsidiaries of the MPS, has close ties with all six universities in Israel as well as the Weizmann Institute.

Through the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), some € 282 million have been made available through the Society as funding. Over the decades the BMBF has approved further cooperation with Israel: 1973 marked the start of interministerial cooperation with the participation of Israel’s equivalent ministries.  Since the beginnings of the German-Israeli  Foundation for scientific research and development (GIF) in 1986, a total of € 282 million has been provided as grants. German-Israeli project cooperation began in 1997. The most recent pillar in scientific cooperation is the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was founded in 2009.

 

International research and instruction at one of the leading institutions worldwide

 

Christine Stollberg is a physicist at the Weizmann Institute for Science (WIS), almost following in the footsteps of Lorenz Krüger, who as a German pioneer also worked in the field of physics at the WIS. Stollberg’s professor in Jena had been in touch with Rehovot since the 1990s, and he introduced her to the Weizmann Institute. Her earlier research group in Jena is constructing a spectrometer for Stollberg’s team at the WIS.  For her doctoral research she is trying to accelerate the free electrons in a plasma. Her goal: “To put together a wave guide for a high-intensity laser.” Perhaps one day it will be possible from this to cobble together a method for treating cancer, she explains.

The beginnings of the WIS go back well before the foundation of the Israeli state. Its history is closely connected with that of Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel. As one of the leaders of the Zionist movement and a professional chemist, Weizmann urged the establishment of a research institute in what was then Palestine. Ultimately the money came from a British couple called Israel and Rebecca Sieff. In 1934 they named it Daniel Sieff Research Institute in memory of  their son. On the occasion of Weizmann’s 75th birthday in 1949 it was rededicated as the Weizmann Institute.

 

Today the WIS comprises five faculties for mathematics and computer science, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, employing 2,500 people. It is ranked as one of the world’s top 100 research institutes. Teaching at the WIS is also high class: more than 1,000 students can study for an M.Sc. or Ph.D. at the Feinberg Graduate School. English is the language of research and instruction but, as Nadine Töpfer reports, she is also studying Hebrew. The language course is offered on campus.

Immunologist Alexander Mildner is enthralled by the extensive 120 hectare grounds of the Rehovot Institute.  “It makes scientific cooperation unbelievably easy.” He spent four years at the WIS researching a particular cell type of white blood cells, and today is researching at Berlin’s Charité, returning every year to Israel for three months. He extols the fact that knowledge is not only exchanged in lectures specific to a particular department but is also accessible to everyone connected with the Institute.

 

As Daniel Zajfman, President of the Weizmann Institute puts it,  “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” He also applies this saying to German-Israeli cooperation. “Knowledge is based on a complex nexus of education, culture, systems of belief and of course personal networks and the community. Only if everyone brings exactly the same thing to the table does something new come out of the whole,” according to Zajfman, who is also a member of the Senate of the Max Planck Society.

 

Who comes to Israel keeps coming back for more

 

The Minerva Society finances some 80 research projects on an ongoing basis at the Weizmann Institute. This translates to a total of 2,330 projects since the beginning of the two countries’ cooperation. In addition, some 50 fellowships are awarded every year, together with the funding of centers of excellence undertaking interdisciplinary research known as the Minerva Centers. These are regularly monitored by a supervisory committee to ensure that the research meets the highest scientific standards. In 2015 there were 20 Minerva Centers at Israeli universities, plus three at the WIS. This network of scientists undertakes research not only in the natural sciences but also in law and the humanities.

Anyone who comes to Israel keeps coming back for more. This is what happened for Kornelius Kupczik, whose special field is evolutionary anthropology. The Leipzig University researcher has had contacts with his fellow researchers in Rehovot since 2007.  As this crossroads of civilizations, where the latest findings show that Neanderthal and Homo sapiens are likely to have encountered each other 55,000 years ago, Kupczik finds the fossils and artifacts for his research. In 2014 Kupczik was one of the research fellows involved in the establishment of the Max Planck Weizmann Center for Integrative Archaeology and Anthropology, which has one track in Leipzig and another in Rehovot.  Experts in Israel on age determination are investigating a radiocarbon dating method. “Why do so many people not have wisdom teeth?” is one of the questions that he is investigating. The solution to this riddle may perhaps be found in Israel.