17. September 2009 Helmholtz Head Office

Speech at the Annual General Assembly 2009

Prof. Jürgen Mlynek, President of the Helmholtz Association

The spoken word has precedence

Ladies and gentlemen!

The motto of this year’s general assembly is “big questions, big research projects.” Science is born out of big questions and it will never cease asking new ones. Even today, at the beginning of the 21st century, many of the really big questions remain unanswered. What is the universe made of? What is the origin of matter? What happens at the earth’s core? Will computers be more intelligent than human beings one day? And the eternal question: Why must we die?

The desire to answer these questions is more than just plain curiosity. Knowledge is the key to tackling the many major challenges that face our society today. How can we preserve the basic resources that make life on earth possible? How can we triumph over disease? How can we assure an energy supply for the future?

Most people are not all that interested in science and technology for their own sake; they are more interested in their uses. The mission of the Helmholtz Association is to increase our knowledge and the uses to which it is put at the same time.

This evening I would like to give you a brief idea of how we are doing that and where our strengths lie. In the second part of my speech I will talk about the partners who have joined us on this mission.

Allow me to give you some examples of current research projects that demonstrate our strengths:

February this year saw the inauguration of the new Alfred Wegener Institute station in Antarctica. We are very proud of this great feat of engineering that was set up in just seven months over two Antarctic summer seasons. The station’s ingenious technical construction enables it to actually lift itself up above accumulating snow and ice. Neumayer Station III not only serves as a vital base camp for scientific expeditions, it is also an observatory where data on the earth’s magnetic field, radiation and climate-relevant gases can be gathered and changes in the sensitive polar biosphere monitored. Neumayer Station III has its finger on the pulse of the planet at the place where its skin is the thinnest.

However, our knowledge about the planet we live on would be pretty specious without our ability to view it from space. The German Aerospace Center operates a fleet of satellites whose most recent addition, the earth observation satellite TerraSAR-X, is equipped with X-band radar. The satellite circles the earth in a near-polar orbit at an altitude of 514 kilometres. Regardless of weather conditions, cloud cover, or the amount of light, the satellite is able to deliver images with a resolution of down to one metre. This project is the result of a highly successful public-private partnership between the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the German Aerospace Center and the EADS subsidiary Astrium.

The twin satellite TanDEM-X is scheduled to be launched at the end of this year. As the diagram shows, TanDEM X and TerraSAR will work together to compile a precise 3-D digital map of the earth’s surface. It is a completely new measuring technique that will chart the entire land surface of the earth – that is, over 150 million square kilometres – in the space of just three years.

Satellite images give us the bigger picture. But some big questions can only be answered by looking at tiny structures and the most minute particles. At DESY in Hamburg, a new light source that generates high brilliance X-ray radiation of up to 100 kilo-electron volts is set to commence operation in the coming months. The new radiation source PETRA III will enable us to analyse even extremely small samples of material and obtain images of their atomic structure. This information will give us far greater insight into the structure of proteins, which will greatly assist efforts to determine the precise effect of medications.

PETRA was originally built for particle physics research. Our pictures show the experimental hall following reconstruction, the 2.3 kilometre storage ring, FLASH – the free-electron laser that has been in operation for some time – and the European X-ray free-electron laser XFEL, which is still under construction, and which you will hear more about in the “Science Talk” session.

This new facility opens up a unique range of experimental possibilities at the Hamburg location.

These new infrastructures enable DESY, which is celebrating its 50th jubilee this year, to successfully shift its focus from particle physics to photon research, and to X-ray light in particular. DESY has, in a sense, reinvented itself – an impressive example of the internal dynamics of Helmholtz centres in general!

The fact that the great quantities of data generated from research into the Structure of Matter cannot be analysed without massive computing capacity seems obvious enough. The importance of high-performance computing – or supercomputing – goes beyond simply supporting empirical research. Practical experiments enable us to witness something we have already established. Simulation and modelling, however, give us an idea of how systems change depending on their physical specifications. Forschungszentrum Jülich has established itself as the European centre of this new core technology. In May this year, we witnessed the launch of JUGENE, Europe’s first petaflop system. JUGENE can handle roughly one quadrillion computing operations per second – equivalent to the performance of around 25,000 PCs.

The supercomputer’s approximately 72,000 processors are housed in 72 water-cooled racks, as you can see in the picture here. And I am delighted that Professor Lippert and Professor Wolf are here in person to give us some insight into their work at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre later on this evening.

One of the areas of application of the simulations being conducted in Jülich is research into nuclear fusion.  Asdex Upgrade in Garching near Munich is the most important fusion device in Germany, and you can admire its torus-shaped interior in this picture. Nuclear fusion is the natural process by which stars, including our own sun, produce energy. The idea of putting this process to the service of humankind is a long-held dream, as nuclear fusion would offer a clean energy source of almost unlimited supply. At the dawn of nuclear research around 50 years ago, it was commonly presumed that this means of generating electricity would have established itself by the end of the century. But as the history of research into nuclear fusion has shown, this challenge is a great deal more complicated than was first imagined. However, this same history has also shown that technological obstacles can be surmounted.

Since the moon landing 40 years ago at the latest we have known that we can only achieve ambitious technological goals with decently sized budgets. And I believe that if any contemporary project matches the scale and ambition of the “putting a man on the moon” project, it is nuclear fusion, however long and arduous the way ahead may be. The ITER international test reactor in Caderache in the south of France, which is still under construction, and the Wendelstein 7-X  stellarator experiment in Greifswald, whose plasma vessel you can see in the picture here, will most certainly not be the last of our efforts in this direction.

We have already been successful in using the power of the sun to generate electricity in various other ways. The Andasol 1 solar power station in the Spanish province of Granada was inaugurated on 1 July. Andasol is not a research institute, but a commercial power plant, and it is a good illustration of the manifold ways in which science can benefit the economy. Researchers from the German Aerospace Center contributed to the technological development of the collectors required and used satellite data to help identify the best location for the plant.

Another project that I find hugely exciting is the Desertec consortium, initiated by private enterprise, which aims to use this technology to import electricity from northern Africa. Andasol 1’s 600 parabolic trough collectors can supply almost 200,000 people with electricity.

Two hundred thousand people – that’s around the number of inhabitants in a decent-sized city like Mainz or Rostock. It is also the number of test persons we will regularly examine as part of the Helmholtz Cohort study. Our knowledge about the causes of diseases like diabetes, cancer and dementia is still piecemeal. Working out what percentage of the 700 or so people assembled here tonight are statistically more likely to contract Alzheimer’s is of no use to us at all. If we actually want to do something about it, to effectively fight these diseases, we have to know exactly who is at risk and why.

The Cohort study therefore plans to monitor developments in healthy test persons for at least a decade, asking them questions, taking blood samples and examining them via medical imaging techniques. This study, we believe, will help us determine the influence of genetic predisposition, lifestyle and environmental factors on our health and the possible links between them.

The Helmholtz Cohort study is another subject we will be hearing more about from my colleagues later on. For my part, I see this study as an excellent example of the scale and ambition of the research projects undertaken by the Helmholtz Association.

The topics that the Helmholtz Association addresses demand a great deal of perseverance. These are questions of such fundamental importance that we have to get an awful lot of people and funding involved in our quests for answers. These projects exceed the limits of what can be done in the laboratory and often necessitate the creation of completely new research infrastructures.

This approach to research has turned those of us that work with the Helmholtz Association into specialists in large-scale research infrastructures. As the planners, builders and operators of exciting international large-scale devices such as particle accelerators, synchrotons, lasers, research vessels, aircraft and satellites, we are actively boosting the German research system, which directly benefits thousands of users each year. At present, the Helmholtz Association operates a total of 25 large-scale devices, which are also made available to thousands of external researchers from Germany and abroad for more than half their operating time.

It is important to emphasise that our work in research management and in the construction and operation of large-scale devices is not an end in itself. We use these instruments to engage in research that both expands our understanding of phenomena in the natural world and provides for Germany’s future. That is our mission.

The nature of our mission has led the government to entrust us with further tasks, which is a very pleasing development. The most recent example is the founding of the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases, which looks at Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia in general. This centre is actively trying to improve mental health in old age.

The merger of the BESSY synchrotron facility in Berlin-Adlershof with the Helmholtz Centre Berlin, and the founding of the Helmholtz Institute Jena, which specialises in lasers and particle accelerators, have strengthened our profile in the former East Germany – a pleasing development 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  This trend is set to continue with the integration of the Forschungszentrum Dresden Rossendorf into the Helmholtz Association in 2011.

What we need in order to do our job properly and keep pace with challenges is a corresponding development of the resources at our disposal. We need a steady flow of funding, as we have been granted over the past four years through the Pact for Research and Innovation. I would like to take this opportunity to again express my thanks to the federal government and the individual states for their invaluable support.

We were all extremely relieved that the government decided to continue its support for the Pact for Research and Innovation after 2011 with its “Package of Pacts”.

An annual budget increase of five percent for German research organisations over the next five years is a weighty promise indeed. And I urge policymakers to keep this promise in the upcoming legislative period, however great the economic hardship may turn out to be. Investing in research is a high-yield investment in the future.

We, for our part, take our duty as partners to the pact very seriously. Significant resources are put into our hands, and we need to justify the trust placed in us by delivering a convincing performance. It is a great responsibility, one which often leads us back to the same old question: Are we doing the right things? And if so, are we doing them right?

These nagging doubts have led us is to subject all our research activities to rigorous testing once every five years. The fact that the amount of basic funding we receive is directly related to the results of these evaluations is some indication of how seriously we take this process, and we are forced to set priorities in advance. We call this process “programme-oriented funding”. In 2008 and 2009 we completed the second of these evaluation rounds in all six research areas, asking over 380 international experts to rate our performance and our plans according to their scientific quality and strategic relevance. To them and all those who contributed to these expert evaluations, I hereby offer my heartfelt thanks.

The most pleasing thing about this evaluation was naturally the outstanding results we achieved. It is a very good feeling to receive confirmation from independent sources that we are doing the right things the right way. However, the evaluation brought us more than just praise; it also gave us valuable ideas on how to develop a strategy to augment our strengths. The pooling of our climate-related research within the Helmholtz Climate Initiative and the establishment of the Helmholtz Cohort were both initiated by evaluation findings.

It is a peculiar characteristic of our evaluation procedure that not only our present performance is rated, but also our plans for the future. The planning horizon is set for the next five years. But the fact is, the nature of our mission demands that we think beyond the limits of this medium-term horizon. We want to make sure that we will still be doing the “right things the right way” in ten, 15 and 20 years from now. And that means making a contribution to Germany’s future. The Helmholtz Association has therefore initiated a “portfolio and foresight process” to help us compare our current strengths with possible future challenges and thus develop our organisation further. The kind of research infrastructures we might have to plan and set up in the future are an important part of these considerations. As the saying goes: the surest way to predict the future is to shape it yourself!

Yet we do not decide the future of our organisation alone. For one thing is clear: these questions about tomorrow’s world concern us all. As Germany’s largest research organisation, it is our responsibility to put our energy and resources into tackling the challenges that will face our society as a whole. Dealing with the needs of society is one of the tasks of government. That is why policymakers are is our most important partners when it comes to deciding the future directions our research is to take. That is a fact and in no way impinges on the autonomy of science. There can be no compromises in the search for scientific truth – that is a non-negotiable position. But the question of whether society sees the technologies resulting from this knowledge as necessary and acceptable is entirely different, and cannot be answered by science alone. That is why we need dialogue on what topics we, as a national research organisation, should focus on in the interests of society. We alone cannot gauge the social relevance of our research, just as politicians cannot measure the scientific importance of our activities.

That is why we have to work with our partners in politics, business and society to identify which big questions we want to look into. Then we can search for the answers, not alone, but in collaboration with our scientific partners.

There is a proverb that says “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We have very consciously chosen the latter course, because that reflects the aims of our mission.

Our most important partners in this process are universities.

The most advanced symbiosis between a Helmholtz centre and a university will be inaugurated as a separate legal entity on 1 October this year: the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The KIT will have a staff of over 8,000 and an annual budget of around 700 million euros. The German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases is also setting new standards in collaboration with universities. In addition to the main centre currently being developed in Bonn, there are six partner locations at universities across Germany that are focusing on specialised topics such as the causes of Alzheimer’s disease (that’s in Munich), neuromodulation (in Magdeburg) and healthcare research (in Witten-Herdecke).

We also want to form topic-specific national research consortia that bring together Germany’s best research institutes to address other topics. We believe the Helmholtz Association has a special duty to make advances in those fields that are critical to our mission.

In the area of healthcare, this means large-scale research infrastructures like the Cohort and efforts to fight common diseases. Those are the challenges that we are responsible for taking on in the service of our nation and its future. I know that this interpretation of the role of the Helmholtz Association is still contested by some, but we are open to discussion and are confident that we can turn sceptics into willing partners.

These discussions should focus on the most convincing arguments that serve our central purpose. That means: an optimally integrated research environment with sensibly allocated responsibilities for the various functions and topics; and a fair partnership on an equal footing. We want to stick to these rules, and see ourselves as team players in areas that are not part of our core expertise. That is the only way we can perform research together, research that will secure the future of our country and the society we live in.

For that is what we are all striving for, and what the Helmholtz Association and its partners stand for. The type of research that increases knowledge and the uses to which it is put is the type of research that gets Nobel Prizes. This is evidenced by the achievements of Helmholtz researcher Harald zur Hausen, who was awarded the prize last year. Research that increases knowledge helps protect life and secure prosperity. In short, research that asks big questions and finds big answers. That is our mission. That is Helmholtz!

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