03.07.2009
Research continues to receive strong support
Despite the financial and economic crisis there is still a lot of funding available in Germany for scientific research. Two recent examples from the highly research friendly State of Baden-Württemberg are the funding provided for the “Immunotherapy” Collaborative Research Centre at the University of Tübingen as well as substantial new financial backing for the collaborative research undertaken by four physics institutes in Heidelberg.
The German Research Foundation (DFG) will be providing 12.7 million euros for a four year period beginning in July 2009 for work on immunotherapy in Tübingen. The objective of the Tübingen researchers is to establish basic knowledge about HLA molecules which play a fundamental role in highly individual human immune systems. It is precisely because these immune systems are so unique that people respond in such different ways to infectious agents. These differences must also be taken into account in transplantations. The basic knowledge, which scientists are acquiring in Tübingen, should also, it is hoped, help in the search for new methods of treatment for cancer and leukaemia.
The Institute of Physics at the University of Heidelberg will receive a total of seven million euros over the next three years from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for its collaborative research with bodies outside the University. The main funding target, and the recipient of 5.3 million euros, is the participation by Heidelberg scientists in experiments with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, the world´s largest particle physics laboratory. Working groups from Heidelberg are playing a key role in three of the four LHC experiments – ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb. The Heidelberg-based researchers have already received almost 23 million euros in funding for these projects in recent years. According to Heidelberg University no other university anywhere in the world is involved to anything like this extent in the work on the LHC programme in Geneva. The experiments have numerous objectives: The researchers want to prove the existence of a new type of matter known as quark-gluon-plasma, are searching for “dark matter” and also want to examine the behaviour of matter and anti-matter. The LHC – at a length of 27 kilometres, the biggest particle accelerator in the world – is currently out of operation. The accelerator was brought to a halt by an electrical fault shortly after the commissioning of the machine at a cost of more than two billion euros in September 2008. However, the machine should resume operations this autumn. The second focus of collaborative research in Heidelberg is the development of new experiments to examine core matter at very high levels of density in the planned accelerator complex FAIR in Darmstadt.
