Campus Museum Tour

The Berlin-Buch health region is located to the northeast of the German capital. For more than a century it has been known for its clinics, biotechnology companies and research institutions. The Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) is the largest and most well-known institution, but the campus has many other components.

The Campus Museum off ers a look back into history. It is located in a building erected in 1928/29, to house the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, which began operations in conjunction with its neurological clinic in 1930. The institute had been founded in 1916 by Oskar Vogt. From then until 1937, he headed what was at the time the world‘s largest and most modern neuroscience institute. Research focused on the histological-anatomical and functional layers and fi eld structures of the brain. In addition, the institute gained its reputation by the work of Nikolai Wladimirovich Timoféeff -Ressovsky, a Russian geneticist, on gene mutations and the structure of genes, work carried out in part with Max Delbrück.

Starting in 1937, Vogt‘s successor Hugo Spatz placed an institutional focus on various neuropathological conditions including brain tumors. From 1939/40, the institute became involved in examining the brains of euthanasia and war victims. In 1947, the institute and clinic were handed over to the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin and were renamed the Institute for Medicine and Biology. The site developed into a wellknown center for cancer research, with work on chemical carcinogenesis, oncogenic viruses, biochemistry, immunology, genetics and radiobiology and clinical treatments for tumors. Cardiovascular research was established as a second focus from 1956, in a manner that also combined research with clinical practice. In 1972, the various Academy institutions in Buch were reformed into the central institutes for molecular biology, cancer research and cardiovascular research.

With the unification of the two German states in 1990, the Academy institutes were closed down in accordance with the unifi cation agreement. In their place, in 1992, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) was established on the campus. Beginning in 1995 the site became home to biotechnology companies in the BiotechPark, with an innovation and start-up center. In 2000 the Leibniz Research Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) moved from Friedrichfelde to the Campus Berlin-Buch.

The early vision of the Campus Berlin-Buch was to combine research with clinics, and this characterizes the campus to this day. In the meantime, this combination of basic and clinical research has become a successful model that has been adopted by many other institutions, including the German Cancer Research Center, which was founded in Heidelberg in 1964.

The history of medical research in Berlin-Buch is impressively refl ected in the Campus Museum, which opened to the public at the end of the 1990s. It is housed in the original building of the former Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, which was renamed the Oskar-und-Cécile-Vogt-House in 1992. Scientifi c equipment from a century of biomedical research is on display on the ground fl oor, giving visitors a chance to view the stages in the history of medicine and research.