Morphological Research Directions at Neuroscience-Related Institutes of the German Max Planck Society, 1948–2002
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the continuation of the pathological morphology research program at neuroscience-related institutes from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society after World War II. It covers the research tradition in the brain sciences, which can be described by an emphasis on gross anatomy, the functional implications of morphological substrates, and the analysis of neurohistological research paths of the human brain in comparative contexts. To enable examination of the assimilation processes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society’s legacy, the decisions and developments of the newly created Max Planck Society in Germany and its early brain science facilities will be assessed for the time period from 1948 to 2002. Pertaining to these overall developments in the Max Planck Society, a persistence of the “morphological paradigm” (microanatomy, pathology, comparative anatomy, etc.) can be identified as lasting until the 1960s. The newer “functional paradigm” (neurophysiology, electroencephalography, cybernetics, and behavioral studies) only became more visible when the first generations of the scientific leaders left their positions in this national research society. It is of note that many directors and scientific members, including Detlev Ploog (1920–2005), Dieter Lux (1924–1995), Georg W. Kreutzberg (1932–2019), Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt (1927–1992), Hans Thönen (1928–2012), Manfred Eigen (1927–2019), Erwin Neher (b. 1944), Hartmut Wekerle (b. 1944), Albert Hertz (1921–2018), Bert Sakmann (b. 1942), and Wolf Singer (b. 1943) were part of the American Neuroscience Research Program as associates, members, conference chairs, or trainees. Likewise, they joined the Society for Neuroscience early on, after it had emerged from the Neuroscience Research Program’s steering committee in 1969. This article seeks to clarify the context of the reorganization of the brain research-related Max Planck Institutes during the postwar period after World War II. Its trajectory includes the location of the institutes, their previous involvement in applied research, and personal continuities in scientific leadership positions, contributing to debates during the first decades of the Max Planck Society. The lens of pathological brain research emerges here as an important viewpoint to aid the understanding of the continued impact and concerns over the dominant morphological approaches in postwar West German neurology and psychiatry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".