Naturwissenschaften – the long-standing official organ of the German Society of Natural Scientists and Physicians

Naturwissenschaften first appeared in 1913 and is now celebrating its 90th anniversary. In addition, it has also been the official journal of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und rzte (German Society of Natural Scientists and Physicians, GDNAe) for the past 79 years, during which time it has been very closely associated with the society. Both partners can look back on a remarkable history, and each of them has played a significant role in the history of the natural sciences in Germany, a history that obviously also reflects the ups and downs of 20thcentury German history. The Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und rzte was founded in 1822 by the natural philosopher and doctor Lorenz Oken (1779–1851), a close friend of Goethe’s and Schelling’s; the aim of the new society was to “maintain personal ties between natural scientists and physicians and to promote the natural sciences and medicine in areas of common interest”. Annual meetings were to be held at which, as Oken put it, people were to tell one another what they had been thinking about and doing since they last met. In contrast to the much older academies, which only accepted highly reputed academics as members, the GDNAe was open to all natural scientists and medics. A deliberate attempt was also made to include the general public too: the meetings were to take place in an “open house”, as stipulated in the founding articles of 1822. The first meeting took place in Leipzig in the same year and was attended by about 60 people. From then on, meetings were held once a year in Halle an der Saale in 1823, in W rzburg in 1824, in Frankfurt am Main in 1825, in Dresden in 1826, in Munich in 1827 and in Berlin in 1828. By this time 458 people attended, and discussions were led by Alexander von Humboldt. The most famous participants included Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician from G ttingen; Leopold Gmelin, the chemist and mineralogist from Heidelberg; Hans-Christian Orstedt, the physicist from Denmark; J ns Jakob Berzelius, the father of modern analytical chemistry from Sweden; and Christian Wilhelm Hufeland, a doctor from Berlin. Lorenz Oken and the society’s founding members seem to have recognised the need of the age, because shortly thereafter the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was founded in England along the same lines as the GDNAe, and the BAAS in turn served as a role model for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). All the important results in the natural sciences and medicine were discussed by well-known researchers and scientists at the GDNAe meetings. These included Justus von Liebig, Ernst Haeckel, Max von Pettenkofer, Rudolf Virchow, Otto Warburg, Hermann von Helmholtz, Arnold Sommerfeld and Walter Gerlach, to name but a few; these people and many others made their mark on the society and its meetings. At the 82nd meeting in K nigsberg (now Kaliningrad) in 1910, for example, Max Planck gave a talk on the universal constants, including what came to be known as Planck’s constant. Three years later in Vienna, Albert Einstein spoke about the “current status of the gravitation problem” and presented the basic outlines of his General Theory of Relativity, which was published in 1916. At the 94th meeting in Dresden in 1936, Gerhardt Domagk described the successful use of the sulphonamides he was researching in the chemotherapy of bacterial infections, using his own daughter’s dramatic illness as an example. The GDNAe was of course repeatedly faced with a dilemma: on the one hand, following Oken’s wishes, it aimed to ensure that although lectures and discussions Prof. Dr. R. Emmermann, President of the German Society of Natural Scientists and Physicians, Chairman of the Executive Board