The order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts was founded in 1842 by the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Federal President Theodor Heuss revived it in 1952. New members are co-opted by the order’s chapter at its meeting.
In 2020 the order had 40 German and 40 foreign members. After the election of September 2025 it had 36 German and 37 foreign members.
On 28 November 1919 Albert Einstein explained his theory to the readers of The Times in London. In the German text, Was ist Relativitäts-Theorie?, he divided physical theories into two kinds. Most are constructive theories. The second kind he called Prinzip-Theorien, principle theories.
Their starting point, Einstein wrote, is general properties of natural processes, principles, aus denen dann mathematisch formulierte Kriterien folgen, denen die einzelnen Vorgänge … zu genügen haben, from which follow mathematically formulated criteria that the single processes must satisfy. Die Relativitätstheorie gehört zu den Prinzip-Theorien. The theory of relativity belongs to the principle theories.
He also wrote that these general principles are themselves empirisch gefunden, found by experience.
The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preis is awarded every year by the German Research Foundation, the DFG. It has existed since 1986 and is called the most important research funding prize in Germany. Each winner receives 2.5 million euros. Winners can use the money for their research for up to seven years, nach ihren eigenen Vorstellungen und ohne bürokratischen Aufwand, according to their own ideas and without bureaucratic effort. Up to ten prizes can be awarded per year. The ten winners for 2026 were chosen from 144 proposals. By December 2025, twelve Leibniz winners had later received a Nobel Prize.
On 20 September 2019, the German research icebreaker Polarstern set out on the MOSAiC expedition. The plan was to let the ship freeze into the Arctic ice and drift with it for a year. The federal government described the departure in one sentence: Nach zehn Jahren der Vorbereitung war es soweit, after ten years of preparation, the time had come. The expedition cost 140 million euros. About 600 scientists from different fields took part. Six icebreakers were to supply the ship, and a runway for supply aircraft was to be built on the ice floe. On 4 October 2019, the ship was frozen into a floe and its main engines were switched off. From then on, it moved only with the ice, inside a drift corridor that had been calculated in advance.
Paul Ehrlich, Nobel laureate in medicine, searched systematically for a drug against syphilis. His team made hundreds of compounds and tested them one after another. His assistant Sahachiro Hata tested them methodically on infected mice. Compound number 606 worked. It was introduced in 1910 as Salvarsan. Ehrlich liked to say that success in research needs four Gs: Geld, Geduld, Geschick und Glück. Money, patience, skill and luck.
In 2020 BioNTech, the company of two doctors from Mainz, ran Projekt Lightspeed. Within only 11 months its COVID-19 vaccine went from the laboratory to a conditional approval. The speed had to be explained. On 21 November 2020 the newspaper taz interviewed Klaus Cichutek, president of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, which shares responsibility for approving vaccines. The interviewer began: normalerweise dauert es Jahre, bis ein Impfstoff entwickelt ist. Jetzt sind es Monate. Normally it takes years to develop a vaccine. Now it is months. Cichutek answered: Ich kann Sie beruhigen. Wir handeln nicht nach Bauchgefühl, sondern mit dem Kopf. I can reassure you. We act with our heads, not our gut. He added that the clinical trials had more test persons than usual. On 9 December 2020 he told an online symposium of the medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt: Wir haben beim Zulassungsprozess für die Impfstoffe nichts unterlassen, was nötig und üblich ist. We left out nothing in the approval process that is necessary and customary.
Here speed won acceptance once it was shown that no step had been skipped.
In 1748 Gottfried Achenwall became an associate professor at the University of Göttingen. He gave Statistik, the systematic description of states, the form of an independent discipline. In 1749 he published an outline of the political science of the leading European states.
August Ludwig von Schlözer called him the “Vater der Statistik”, the father of statistics. The national biography adds that the word Statistik does not come from him at all.
The German Research Foundation’s code of good scientific practice of 2019 says of the authors of a publication: Sie tragen für die Publikation die gemeinsame Verantwortung, they bear joint responsibility for it, unless stated otherwise. Honorary authorship is not allowed. A leading position alone does not make anyone a co-author. The Deutsches Ärzteblatt called the affair around the researchers Herrmann and Brach the largest German forgery affair. Several hundred co-authors were checked. In 2002 the foundation excluded the Freiburg professor Roland Mertelsmann for five years as a reviewer and applicant because of serious flaws, and two other co-authors for two years each. The foundation’s president, Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, told the Ärzteblatt: In der Wissenschaft ist das die Höchststrafe. In science, that is the maximum penalty.
Max Born and Albert Einstein disagreed about how to interpret quantum mechanics, and they argued about it in print. Born commented on this when their letters were published in German in 1969. Auch diese im Druck niedergelegte Meinungsverschiedenheit hat die Freundschaft zwischen uns nicht im leisesten gestört. This difference of opinion, too, set down in print, did not disturb the friendship between us in the least. He added that Einstein had explicitly acknowledged the warm tone of his article.
A junior professor at the University of Hamburg is first appointed for three years. An interim evaluation follows. If it is successful, the appointment is extended by three more years. On tenure-track posts, a second evaluation follows after six years. A candidate who passes it is appointed to a permanent professorship without a public call for applications and without the usual appointment procedure. A joint federal and state program funds 1,000 additional tenure-track posts of this kind, with one billion euros over 15 years.