FLORIDA COURTING SCIENCE POWERHOUSE
BYLINE: By STEPHEN POUNDS Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
The governor's office and Scripps Florida are courting the Max Planck Society, Germany's leading research institution, to expand to Florida and create a life-science campus along with Scripps, a spokesman for the society confirmed.
Discussions began a year ago among Gov. Jeb Bush, Scripps President Richard Lerner and Peter Gruss, president of the Max Planck Society, about bringing one of Europe's premier science organizations to South Florida. Those discussions will continue next week in Palm Beach, society spokesman Bernd Wirsing said.
"We have had talks with Scripps - with Jeb Bush and Dr. Lerner. They had a visit here and there was a counter visit by our president," Wirsing said this week.
The Munich-based society is a research giant named for Max Planck (1858-1947), the father of quantum physics and winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918. Founded in 1948 as a successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the Max Planck Society has grown to 78 institutes, laboratories and research units in Germany and three elsewhere in Europe.
It dwarfs The Scripps Research Institute in size. Max Planck employs 12,400 people, including 4,300 scientists. Since 1954, it has produced 15 Nobel Prize winners, including 10 since 1984. It has a budget of almost $1.8 billion, which is mostly financed by the German federal and state governments.
It conducts research in the life, natural and social sciences and the humanities at a level that universities in Germany are unable to support.
"The Jupiter campus has a one-time opportunity to directly leap into the world class of science," Wirsing said in an e-mail message.
Scripps has broken ground on its permanent headquarters on 30 acres in the Abacoa development in Jupiter. But Max Planck and any other biotechnology group could land on the nearby Briger Tract in Palm Beach Gardens, where 70 acres of Scripps' campus will be built.
Kelly Smallridge, president of the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County, declined to comment Wednesday. Officials from the governor's office could not be reached.
Discussions to persuade the Max Planck Society to build its first U.S. institute in Florida began last November, when Bush led a five-day trade mission to Germany and Switzerland and first met Gruss, a close friend of Lerner.
Lerner knew Gruss before he moved to Max Planck in 1986 from the University of Heidelberg, when he was a genetics professor. Lerner said Gruss already understands how research is financed in the United States because of a stint in the late 1970s at the Laboratory of Molecular Virology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
"He knows the American system well. He's a great administrator and scientist," Lerner said.
Gruss is scheduled to speak to the Scripps board of directors Monday when it meets at The Breakers in Palm Beach. Wirsing declined to say when the Max Planck board would make a decision or how many scientists would be based here.
"It's too early," Wirsing said. "We are in collaboration with leading institutes around the world and Scripps is one of them. We are checking for ways to have deeper collaborations."
Max Planck is also looking for incentives to make the move, Wirsing said in an e-mail. "In order to realize this endeavor, it is necessary firstly to secure financing from Florida sources," he said.
Last month, Lerner told Palm Beach County officials that two additional research institutes were considering a move to Florida, but he declined to name them. He still won't identify the second.
In addition to drawing Scripps here three years ago, Florida has attracted the Burnham Institute for Medical Research to Orlando, the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies to Port St. Lucie and SRI International to Tampa in the past two months.
"This would be a major advance for Florida," Lerner said. "This is a way of keeping the faith with all the people putting up the money (to develop a life-science cluster)."
Donny Strosberg, a Scripps professor of infectology, came to Florida from France and is familiar with the work at Max Planck.
"It's a gigantic institution - well-funded and well-regarded," Strosberg said.
Scripps and Max Planck already have some important connections.
Axel Ullrich, a director at Max Planck and a founding scientist at Genentech Inc. in San Francisco, spoke last year at the Scripps/Oxford International Biotechnology Conference in Palm Beach. Ullrich, among other scientific breakthroughs, did research that led to the development of herceptin, a major breast-cancer treatment.
Manfred Eigen, a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in G UNKNOWN_HIGHBIT_f6 ttingen, was the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1967 for his studies in extremely fast chemical reactions induced by very short pulses of energy. He now works with scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
"They have critical mass in everything from high-energy physics to medicine, and they certainly have had their share of major discoveries," Lerner said.
In recent years, the Max Planck Society has been dealing with the painful past of its predecessor institution, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. In 1999, the Planck society formed a commission to conduct a five-year study of the Kaiser Wilhelm's connection with the Nazi regime before and during World War II.
The commission found that during the Nazi years, many of the society's middle- and lower-level scientists of Jewish descent were fired and expelled.
One institute scientist, Otmar von Verschuer, worked with Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called "Angel of Death" who undertook deadly experiments of human twins at the Auschwitz concentration camp, according to a commission report. Another, Ernst Rudin, was instrumental in drawing up Nazi race policies and laws on sterilization of mentally handicapped people.
Max Planck himself openly opposed the Nazis. He resigned as president of the institute in 1937 to protest the regime. One of his sons was executed by the Nazis in 1944 for his role in the failed plot that year to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
In 2001, Hubert Markl, then president of the Planck Society, apologized for the Kaiser Wilhelm Society's participation in experiments by the Nazis and for taking so long to investigate their roles.
"For too long, colleagues supported each other by remaining silent," he said. "Too many had collaboration with the Nazi dictatorship, either actively or passively, to the point where they were happy to hide their own joint responsibility or even complicity."
Staff researcher Angelica Cortez contributed to this story.
The Max Planck Society
Headquarters: Munich, Germany
Business: Basic research in life, natural and social sciences and the humanities
Founded: 1948, as the successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, founded in 1911
Budget: $1.8 billion
Employees: 12,400