There is no such thing as "the" Max Planck Institute. In fact, the Max Planck Society operates a number of research institutions in Germany as well as abroad. These Max Planck Institutes are independent and autonomous in the selection and conduct of their research pursuits. To this end, they have their own, internally managed budgets, which can be supplemented by third party project funds. The quality of the research carried out at the institutes must meet the Max Planck Society's excellence criteria. To ensure that this is the case, the institutes' research activities undergo regular quality reviews.
The Max Planck Institutes carry out basic research in the life sciences, natural sciences and the social and human sciences. It is thus almost impossible to allocate an individual institute to one single research field: conversely, it can be the case that different Max Planck Institutes carry out research in the same subject.
With the exception of humans, chimpanzees show the most diverse and complex tool using behaviors of all existant species. Primatologists at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology are using new research methods to study chimpanzee tool use in the dense forests of the Congo Basin. They are discovering complex technological skills among these apes that expand current perceptions of chimpanzee cognition and material culture.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology examine how biomedicine is shaped through its engagements in Africa. Biomedicine is regarded as a circulating set of technologies, practices, and ideas that – as a by-product of prevention and healing – links individual bodies to the political order. Africa is central for understanding global shifts in the making of social, political, and juridical forms of governance because the continent is marginalised in the global political economy and thus represents a site of intense conflict and experimentation.
Life in concentrated brines under extreme conditions of nutrition requires extreme adaptation. By molecular and functional analysis of cellular constituents of halophilic archaea it is possible to gain insight into the biology of these fascinating organisms on a systems level of the cell.
Animal embryos specify four early cell types. Determining the underlying mechanism is one central question of developmental biology. At present, it is studied how the crustacean Parhyale hawaiensis manages such developmental program at the eight-cell stage. Specification of germ cells, e.g., depends on the genes vasa and nanos, however, in a different way than in Drosophila melanogaster , demonstrating change of gene function during evolution.
Nature hasn’t made things easy for mammals. Admittedly, as any other vertebrate – they develop from a fertilised egg, but unlike fish or frogs, the embryo cannot prosper by itself. Only if it succeeds, after having divided a couple of times, in implanting with its outer cells in the womb, its inner cells will create a foetus. It has long been unclear as to when and how the cells of an embryo pursue various lineages. Scientists of the MPI for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster have now advanced a great deal towards unravelling this mystery.