Interviews are an excellent source of information for historians of science. They should be done by historians who understand science in detail and, if possible, better than the scientists they interview. In the case of applied industrial or governmental sciences, historians must have detailed knowledge of economic or historic sources. Again they should know more in these areas than those they interview. If, on the contrary, the interviewers are not scientists at heart who know science, the history they write will (...) become at best literature but at worst pseudoscientific abracadabra. (shrink)

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem was the centre of scientific racism in Nazi Germany. Its bad history culminated in a research project to analyse the molecular basis of racial differences in the susceptibility to various infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. Josef Mengele, a former postdoc of the director of the institute, Otmar von Verschuer, collected blood samples and other material in Auschwitz from families and twins of Jews and Gypsies. The blood samples were (...) analysed by Günther Hillmann in the Berlin laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Adolf Butenandt. Butenandt had just moved to Tübingen. The project was paid for by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Butenandt, Hillmann and von Verschuer made scientific careers in the Federal Republic. To the present day this past has not been acknowledged by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft as part of its history. (shrink)

Adolf Butenandt war einer der großen Biochemiker des vergangenen Jahrhunderts. Er war auch ein außerordentlich erfolgreicher Wissenschaftsorganisator. Welchen Preis mußte er im Dritten Reich hierfür zahlen? Es war die konsequente Nicht-Wahrnehmung allen Unrechts um ihn herum. Unrecht, von dem er nichts wußte, existierte für ihn nicht. Mit dieser Haltung war er das perfekte Vorbild für die deutsche Nachkriegsgeneration. Ist er das noch heute? Adolf Butenandt was one of the great biochemists of the last century. He was also a most successful (...) organiser of science. Which price did he have to pay to be a success in the Third Reich? He persistently avoided seeing or hearing the blatant injustice around him. Injustice he knew nothing about did not exist. So he became the perfect model for the postwar generation of German scientists. Is he still a model today? (shrink)