Scholarship And Research : Germany

In recent years, the Nobel Prize winners for chemistry, physics and medicine have included Germans. The 1988 prize for chemistry, for instance, was shared by Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel. In 1989 the prize for physics was shared by Wolfgang Paul and two American colleagues, and in 1991 the prize for medicine was awarded to Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann for their work in the field of cellular biology. Nobel laureates from Germany in 1995 were the developmental biologist Christiane Nusslein-Volhard (medicine) and the Dutch chemist Paul J. Crutzen, who teaches in Mainz.

In earlier times, Germany’s universities led the world in many areas of scholarship. Up to the Second World War, ten out of 45 Nobel Prizes for physics and 16 out of 40 for chemistry went to Germans. But starting in 1933, the National Socialists drove many of the country’s best brains abroad. A good number of them went to the United States, where they were of inestimable value to that country’s scientific institutions. Germany had a hard task making up for this brain drain after 1945, and it was a long time before it caught up with the world’s leaders.