German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina

Author(s): Blau, Wolfgang; Cerf, Vinton G; Enriquez, Juan; Francisco, Joseph S; Gasser, Urs; Gray, Mary L; Greaves, Mark; Grosz, Barbara J; Jamieson, Kathleen Hall; Haug, Gerald H; Hennessy, John L; Horvitz, Eric; Kaiser, David I; London, Alex John; Lovell-Badge, Robin; McNutt, Marcia K; Minow, Martha; Mitchell, Tom M; Ness, Susan; Parthasarathy, Shobita; Perlmutter, Saul; Press, William H; Wing, Jeannette M; Witherell, Michael

Während in den urbanen Zentren der Weimarer Republik politische, soziale, technische und kulturelle Umbrüche das Leben bestimmten, prägten Ruhe und Beharrung die ruralen Räume und die sie durchziehenden Landstraßen, auf denen zwischen 1918 und 1933 Vagabund/innen – lose Leute, die aus den unterschiedlichsten Gründen ein nicht-sesshaftes Leben führten – unterwegs waren. Die Verbindung des Vagabundentums mit dem Landleben lässt sich u. a. an den sog. Monarchen auf der Insel Fehmarn nachvollziehen. Diese Landarbeiter/innen, die bereits seit der Jahrhundertwende alljährlich auf die Ostseeinsel kamen, um bei der Ernte zu helfen, wurden dabei zeitweise in das örtliche Landleben integriert, das sie durch ihre zum Teil schillernden Persönlichkeiten und Lebensgeschichten sowie eigene dichterische Aktivitäten bereicherten (vgl. Wiepert 1982).

Amir Teicher, Social Mendelism: Genetics and the Politics of Race in Germany, 1900–1948 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 268. ISBN 978-1-1084-9949-1. £26.99 (hardback). - Volume 55 Issue 2

ABSTRACT Although 75 years have passed since the end of World War II, the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck Gesellschaft, MPG), successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG), still must grapple with how two of its foremost institutes—the KWI of Psychiatry in Munich and the KWI for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch—amassed collections of brains from victims of Nazi crimes, and how these human remains were retained for postwar research. Initial efforts to deal with victim specimens during the 1980s met with denial and, subsequently, rapid disposal in 1989/1990. Despite the decision of the MPG’s president to retain documentation for historical purposes, there are gaps in the available sources. This article provides preliminary results of a research program initiated in 2017 (to be completed by October 2023) to provide victim identifications and the circumstances of deaths.

A single abstract from the DHd-2020 Book of Abstracts.

ZusammenfassungDas Verständnis der Mechanismen, die der atopischen Dermatitis (AD) zugrunde liegen, war ein entscheidender Katalysator für die Entwicklung neuartiger Medikamente zur Behandlung dieser Krankheit. Weltweit entwickeln derzeit mehr als siebzig Pharmaunternehmen mindestens ein neues Medikament für die Behandlung der AD. Diese Übersichtsarbeit soll den aktuellen Stand der wichtigsten neuartigen Therapieansätze auf der Grundlage des heutigen Verständnisses der Pathophysiologie der AD beschreiben.

The United Kingdom's vote in favor of leaving the European Union (EU) has considerable ramifications for science. As the UK negotiates its “Brexit,” there is recognition that research is crucial to long-term economic success and that Europe needs a strong knowledge and innovation system to compete internationally and tackle challenges such as climate change and improved health care. It would be unacceptable to allow Brexit to jeopardize this.

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The call to act more entrepreneurially is often heard when policy-makers and scientists are discussing shortcomings in the management of scientific institutions. Reforming a university so that it better ignites the spirit of entrepreneurship in the minds of its faculty, students, and administrative officers, needs more than just inspiring character sketches of resilient go-getters with a high readiness to assume risk, infectious enthusiasm and, at best, a common-good orientation. Any pragmatically relevant idea of good entrepreneurship must specify the conditions necessary to encourage entrepreneurial action: What incentive scheme should be implemented? What indicators should help evaluate its outcomes? What should the mechanism of accountability be? The debate on the role of entrepreneurship in scientific institutions could profit from a rigorous analysis of what has been going on in the management of economic organizations since the rise to dominion, in the 1980s, of what mostly its adversaries call ‘neoliberal’ thought. ‘The financialization of the firm’—this is how Alexander Styhre, chair in organization theory and management at the University of Gothenburg, identifies the most powerful management trend of the last 40 years in the title of his new book. Embedding that tendency in economic, social, and cultural contexts, Styhre has no qualms about conferring upon his central concept the function of an umbrella term: anything that contributes to, or is a consequence of, understanding economic organizations as ‘bundles of financial resources’ (p. 58) forms part of financialization. Styhre’s main perspective is provided by economic sociology, which explains how economic organizations result from the practices of social actors. In Styre’s first two chapters the reader encounters snapshots of economic history from the birth of chartered banking in Renaissance Genoa to today’s investor capitalism, sociological approaches to the institutional structure of capital accumulation, policy analyses of the deregulation of financial markets, epistemological criticism of neoclassical economics, as well as pointed animadversions on neoliberalism.

Genome plasticity leads to the generation and selection of fitter mutants via the key processes of Darwinian evolution. Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are considered to be the most common bacterial infection in industrialized countries. Genotypic and phenotypic comparisons of closely related E. coli isolates which demonstrated the impact of genome plasticity, i.e., gene acquisition and gene loss, on bacterial evolution as different members of sequence type (ST) 73 represent highly uropathogenic as well as commensal or ABU E. coli isolates. Data on genome-wide changes and adaptation during long-term growth of E. coli in vitro have started to accumulate only recently. Bacterial adaptation to prolonged in vivo growth in different host backgrounds has been analyzed by comparing the genome structure and virulence- and fitness-related phenotypes of E. coli 83972 and three selected reisolates from deliberate human therapeutic urinary bladder colonization. In individual hosts, E. coli 83972 used different strategies to optimize proliferation. The observed increased genome plasticity of in vivo-grown reisolates of E. coli 83972 relative to control isolates from the in vitro experimental evolution study may in part result from stress-induced increased genome plasticity.