Review: Research for the Future

How do future worlds appear? Patrick Kremer investigated this question before taking office as president of the Max Planck Society in June 2023 and traveled to the 84 Max Planck institutions in order to gain insight into the future topics where nearly 24,000 employees work and where research is conducted by employees from more than 100 countries. He summarized his impressions and experiences in a travel report in which he by no means wanted to portray the research of the Max Planck Society as a whole, but simply wanted to provide “typical insights into the fascinating world of science.” In the topics he covered, he “took into account the state of knowledge in the research field and also included research results that had not been generated in the Max Planck Society.”

The book’s 17 chapters address major challenges facing humanity, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, which have serious consequences for humans. Patrick Kremer reports on research conducted by the Max Planck Institutes (MPI), which aims to better understand the links between human behavior, planetary change, and complex ecosystems. Global challenges, including digitalization and migration and their impact on how people live together, are also research topics at the MPI, which Patrick Kremer visited on his trip. Whether it is the production of future energy through hydrogen or nuclear fusion, green chemistry or tomorrow’s medicine, social change or learning, research on the individual topics of the book is being conducted at several MPI institutions.

Research cooperation

Patrick Kremer illustrates how intertwined and inspiring the different research fields are with frequent references to the research approaches of the different institutes, for example when he describes in the chapter on robotics and artificial intelligence that research at the MPI Institute for Intelligent Systems has discovered exoplanets with the help of machine learning that could benefit astrophysics. He emphasizes several times how important cooperation in research in general is. Scientific progress depends, not least, on craftsmanship and engineering capable of producing precision instruments and large experimental facilities, without which it would not be possible to carry out outstanding experiments. It is also made clear time and again that basic and applied research cannot be separated. International cooperation in science is particularly important. It must be possible to attract the best minds from all over the world to research in this country.

Patrick Kremer, who before taking up the position of President of the Max Planck Society was first Director of the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry and then Director of the MPI for Interdisciplinary Natural Sciences, describes in many places how the research results presented to him on his journey left him amazed, fascinated or even moved. This could have left him speechless on several occasions. His enthusiasm for the world of science is evident on every page of the book. In this way, the reader not only gets an overview of the current research landscape, but is also amazed by the possibilities that research holds for the future.

Patrick Kramer: Future Worlds. My Journey into the Science of Tomorrow. S. Fisher Publisher 2024.