Max Planck Institutes and Experts

Focusing on the context of postwar Rome, this project explores the capacity of exhibitions to write the history of their time. With the exhibitionary concepts developed in postwar Rome I pick up on early, site-specific readings of the contemporary. These should provide alternatives to today’s one-sided understanding of the term as an effect of global economies.

Neuropsychiatric conditions are disorders originating in the nervous system. The past 50 years show a steady increase in neurochemical studies on rodent brain. Thereby, neuroscientists have joined the big-data club that was traditionally reserved for astronomers and physicists. By systematically analyzing data from thousands of studies, we were able to develop a free database for optimizing further research. We also demonstrated a mismatch between the current classification of neuropsychiatric drugs and spatiotemporal neurostransmitter response patterns at the systems level.

Lifespan variation is a metric of mortality difference in age at death between individuals. With empirical examples from Germany, the USA, and Finland, we show how this variation is overlooked by monitoring metrics of average mortality levels, such as life expectancy. The latter captures the magnitude of survival gains; lifespan variation captures the equality in survival improvement. To gain a full picture of population health, we need to monitor both.

The well-documented Christianization of Austronesian societies served scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human History as a “natural experiment” to test how various factors influenced the spread of the new faith. This research provides new insights into historical processes and can help to better understand how, for example, demographic, cultural or environmental factors influence the spread and adoption of new institutions, ideologies and technologies today, and how they might spread in the future.

The working group Proteins and Fibers at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science delves into how techniques and methods of using animal materials has developed in history across various locations and moments in time. The history of surgical silk sutures in Japan points to a fresh approach toward the history of animals. By focusing on proteinaceous fibers as the stuff of life subject to scientific analysis, a history of biological materiality begins to take shape.