Take any significant chunk of scientific history, and you'll find that an event from North Rhine-Westphalia is in there somewhere. For example, in June 1983, Jeff Schell of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Plant Breeding Research presented a method for gene transfer in plants. The vehicle that he and his colleagues used for gene transfer was a soil bacterium naturally equipped for the job: Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Schell's article on the subject in the EMBO Journal can claim to have ushered in the era of green biotechnology.
Bonn to battle Neurodegeneration
Since then, all four MPI Plant Breeding's departments have been among the front runners in plant research worldwide. The Institute has also had to face some pretty tough opposition from activists against genetically modified organisms. In the 1980s green biotechnology flourished more ...
