What has been achieved, what lies ahead? After two years as GDNÄ President, Heribert Hofer looks back – and forward to exciting times with the young GDNÄ. 

Professor Hofer, your term of office as President of the GDNÄ is coming to an end. How do you look back?
With a good feeling. I overcame the initial shyness I felt in the face of the GDNÄ’s great history. The positive response at the meeting in Potsdam, whose scientific program was developed during my term of office, contributed to this. Today, more than ever, I am convinced that the GDNÄ is on the right track with its concerns and is filling a gap in the science system. Just think of the unique combination of personal, interdisciplinary exchange that we cultivate at our meetings, or of the programmes to promote young talent. 

You have been involved in the GDNA’s student programme for many years and have created the popular science slam format “Science in 5 Minutes”. Do you feel that the founding of the Young GDNÄ a few weeks ago in Potsdam was the crowning glory of your term in office?
“Crowning glory” is perhaps a bit much; I would rather speak of a highlight. With the Young GDNÄ, we are giving young people significantly more of a say and more opportunities to shape our society. This was evident in Potsdam, for example, in the many panel discussions in which young people discussed issues with established scientists on an equal footing. The format was so well received by the audience that we want to keep it in the future.

© MIKA-fotografie | Berlin

Right in the thick of it: Professor Heribert Hofer at the GDNÄ conference 2024 in Potsdam.

Until now, there was the student program, but now there is almost always talk of the Junge GDNÄ. How are the two related?
The former student program has been incorporated into the Junge GDNÄ. It includes not only high school students, but also university students and young professionals. The age range is therefore much broader than in the student programme, stretching from 17 to around 32 years of age. The Young GDNÄ are young people with excellent grades in science and medicine who are keen to get involved in the GDNÄ. 

How do the young talents react to the offer?
They are incredibly pleased about the interest of established scientists in them. Many of them come to our meetings with the idea that the older ones are not interested in them – a realisation that has amazed me again and again in recent years. With the Young GDNÄ, we welcome the young people with open arms – and they think that’s great. There are already a lot of suggestions and requests. This became clear at a recent strategy meeting, which was attended by three elected representatives of the Young GDNÄ, in addition to the GDNÄ board. 

What do young women and men want from the GDNÄ?
For example, interesting offers between the meetings, opportunities for personal exchange at the local level and with established GDNÄ members. 

What are the next steps?
A meeting of the Young GDNÄ is planned for next year, when there will be no large GDNÄ meeting. The meeting will serve to promote internal networking and strategic discussion. We also want to establish local groups in which GDNÄ members of all ages can come together to discuss and support each other. The first steps in this direction were taken in 2018 by the then president Wolfgang Wahlster, but understandably this initiative has been dormant during the pandemic years. It is also conceivable that interesting events could be organised, such as guided tours of institutes or companies. We will probably start in a few university towns and expand our network of local groups step by step. The first groups are expected to be up and running in about six months.

© MIKA-fotografie | Berlin

“Sharing knowledge means multiplying knowledge” is written on the T-shirt that GDNÄ President Heribert Hofer was presented with by Secretary General Michael Dröscher at the end of the 133rd Assembly in Potsdam.

You are outlining a cross-generational project. Will the older GDNÄ members play along?
I am quite confident. The contributions of the young GDNÄ are very well received at the meetings, both by the speakers and the audience. And in many conversations with established members, I have sensed a great willingness to get involved in promoting young talent.

 The project requires a lot of coordination: Who pulls the strings in the GDNÄ?
As the future vice president, I will take on this task for two years. We have agreed on this in the board. It will be a lot of work, but I am looking forward to it. 

You may soon have a little more time for such projects.
That’s right. I will reach retirement age at the end of March 2025, which means that my term of office as director of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research will come to an end. My regular professorship in this field at Freie Universität Berlin will also expire at that time. Although I will continue to work at my university as a senior professor, my workload will be significantly reduced. This will give me more time for the GDNÄ. 

And what about your spectacular hyena research in the Serengeti?
I will definitely continue with that. Not necessarily on site in Tanzania, as others are now taking over that role, in particular Sarah Benhaiem, to whom I have handed over the project. But in the 37 years of my hyena research, a large amount of data has been collected that is waiting to be evaluated and published. That will easily keep me busy for five years.

Professor von Engelhardt, your 670-page book “Goethe as a Natural Scientist in the Opinion of 19th Century Scientists and Doctors” was recently published. You are the editor of the book. What inspired you to do this work?
I have been studying Goethe and his relationship with science and medicine around 1800 for decades. During my research, I noticed that the German and international reception of Goethe as a natural scientist in the natural sciences and medicine of the 19th century was not dealt with in research, with a few exceptions. This prompted me to address this reception and to document it with selected texts, some of which were found in remote locations. The 670 pages are due to the abundance of remarkable essays.

Who is this volume aimed at?
The work is aimed at Goethe researchers, historians of science and medicine, and anyone interested in Goethe’s contributions to the natural sciences and medicine.

What criteria did you use to select the articles?
The 48 essays by scientists, many of whom were members of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, are intended to provide a representative international impression of the reception of the natural sciences and medicine in the 19th century. For reasons of space, I had to dispense with extensive monographic presentations, which I mention in the detailed introduction, and which are listed in the complete bibliography of 240 texts.

The volume contains texts in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. Why did you decide on the original languages?
I wanted to give an authentic impression in the languages that Goethe also understood. In addition, this approach allows foreign quotations to be cited directly from the texts and referenced bibliographically. Nowadays, anyone who wants translations can easily do so using the appropriate software.

© SUB Göttingen Cod. Ms. Lichtenberg VI, 44.

Goethe considered his theory of colors, symbolized in the color wheel, to be his most important work.

Which texts would you recommend to the reader in a hurry? 
For readers in a hurry, I would particularly recommend the articles by Carl Gustav Carus (first published in 1843), Hermann von Helmholtz (1853), Rudolf Virchow (1861), Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1882) and Ernst Haeckel (1882) – all of whom were members of the GDNÄ. Among the foreign texts, the remarks of Ernest Faivre (1859), François-Louis Hahn (1883), François-Jules Pictet (1838) and John Tyndall (1880) deserve special attention. The chapter on the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley is also very impressive – he was awarded an honorary membership of the GDNÄ at the 1877 meeting in Munich. Huxley opened the first issue of the now internationally authoritative science magazine Nature, published in 1869, with Goethe’s Aphorisms on Nature (see margin). 

Intermaxillary bone, theory of colours, archetypal plant: the naturalist Goethe was involved in an impressive number of scientific topics. How did this come about? 
Throughout his life, inorganic and organic nature, its phenomena, processes and developments were of great interest to Goethe – as such, but also in connection with science, art and human life. “Experience, observation, conclusions – connected by life events” – this is how he described his method in natural research. For Goethe, colours are not only mathematical and physical phenomena; for him, they also have ethical, psychological and cultural-historical meanings. The phenomenon of metamorphosis applies to plants and animals: “The doctrine of metamorphosis is the key to all signs of nature,” as stated in a posthumous text called Morphology. Goethe also published numerous scientific-theoretical writings, including The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject or Inventing and Discovering or Analysing and Discovering. Goethe’s scientific writings comprise eleven volumes in the Leopoldina’s critical scientific edition. 

Goethe was a poet and a naturalist: did the one influence the other? 
Despite all the differences, of which Goethe repeatedly reminds us, the connection between the two, or rather the four cultures, was extremely important to him. What is meant here is the cultures of the natural sciences, the humanities, the arts and life. This connection can be seen in both Goethe’s scientific and literary texts, as well as in his autobiographical writings Poetry and Truth or Italian Journey. One literary example is the novel The Elective Affinities, which corresponds with contemporary chemistry in both title and content and interprets the relationships between elements in analogy to the relationships between people. However, Goethe explicitly points out that people have the freedom and responsibility to resist sensual attractions. In his Theory of Colours, Goethe developed numerous ideas about the theory and practice of colours in painting. And the law of the primal plant, as Goethe recognised in Italy, “can be applied to everything that lives”.

© Frithjof Spangenberg, Illustrationen & Kommunikationsdesign

The illustration shows a sheep’s skull with a clearly visible intermaxillary bone (front right). This was the subject of a heated dispute between Goethe and the GDNÄ founder Lorenz Oken.

To what extent was Goethe a child of his time as a natural scientist?
Goethe was very knowledgeable about the natural sciences and medicine of his time. He was influenced by the state of science, maintained connections with many natural scientists and physicians of the time, but also considered the historical development of the sciences and individual researchers of the past. The Theory of Colours is a prime example: Goethe dedicated an entire book to it, describing its history from antiquity to the present day. 

How did Goethe’s contemporaries react to his work?
As can be seen in the present work, the spectrum of reactions among scientists and physicians of his time and up to the present day was diverse and varied according to scientific discipline. The reactions in physics were extremely critical. There was approval in geology, botany and anatomy. According to Nees von Esenbeck, member of the GDNÄ and president of the Leopoldina from 1818 to 1838, Goethe was the first to organise the plant world according to “scientific principles” and to introduce it philosophically. Overall, Goethe the naturalist made a strong impression on his contemporaries. It would be necessary and informative to compare this with the reactions in the humanities and arts from the 19th century to the present day – a task I would like to leave to other researchers. 

What was Goethe’s relationship with the GDNÄ?
Goethe took an interested and approving part in the meetings of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, founded in 1822, and wrote a study of the GDNÄ that was not published in his time but was later printed several times. He particularly welcomed the new research society’s aim of bringing scientists into personal contact, while noting that its members were not the “least bit” like him. In his speech at the Berlin conference in 1828, Alexander von Humboldt referred to Goethe as a “patriarch of patriotic fame”, whose literary creations did not prevent him from “plunging the researcher’s gaze into the depths of natural life”. 

What was Goethe’s relationship with Lorenz Oken, the founder of the GDNÄ?
The relationship was ambivalent on both sides. A plagiarism dispute between Goethe and Oken triggered the discovery of the cranial vertebra, which Oken described in a publication in 1807 and also sent to Goethe. He was very impressed by the study. He invited Oken to Weimar and supported his appointment to the University of Jena, for which Oken was extremely grateful. In 1823, Goethe claimed the discovery for himself in the Heften zur Morphologie (notebooks on morphology). He said that he had made the discovery in 1790 on the basis of a sheep skull found on the dunes of the Lido of Venice, and although he did not publish it, he reported on it several times in letters from Italy to Germany. Many scientists participated in the controversy and repeatedly took Oken’s side. In other areas, Goethe and Oken were quite close. Despite differing political views and although he described the ban of Oken’s journal Isis in Thuringia, Goethe called the GDNÄ founder “genius”. 

Do you still perceive an interest in Goethe as a naturalist today?
A new interest can be observed in the present, especially in Goethe’s theory of colours. There are attempts to understand Goethe’s research, observations and views in this area in the context of his holistic understanding of nature, which contrasts with the objective or experimental-statistical concept of science in modern times. This is very evident in Goethe’s psychological-cultural interpretation of colours, which is usually neglected by physicists, and in his concept of metamorphosis and morphology in the organic sciences.

To what extent can Goethe contribute to a growing together of cultures in science and art?
Goethe’s significance undoubtedly also lies in his contribution to overcoming or, better said, alleviating the separation of the two or four cultures. Goethe was particularly concerned with a mutual connection and communication between these cultures, which is a challenge for natural sciences and medicine. Conversely, however, the arts and humanities would also have to recognise their scientific basis or dependence on nature – arguably an even greater challenge. Goethe describes how worthwhile the effort can be: “It is a pleasant business to explore nature and oneself at the same time, without harming either nature or one’s mind, but rather to balance the two through gentle reciprocal influence.”

Professor Lohse, at the GDNÄ meeting in Potsdam, you recently gave a lecture on placebos or therapy with nothing. But your profession as a pharmacologist is more about therapy with something. How does that fit together?
At first glance, one might see a contradiction here. But placebo effects also accompany every drug therapy and other medical measures, and that is why they are part of it.

The audience was enthusiastic about your lecture, applauded extensively and had many questions. Why is there so much interest in placebos?
I think that many people are affected by it because they have experienced it themselves or seen it in others and have thought about it. The topic also brings together most diverse schools of thought – from scientific drug therapy to shamanism.

How did you come across the topic?
I have been covering it in my introductory pharmacology lectures for more than twenty years because I think that doctors and pharmacists should know about it. They all work, consciously or unconsciously, with placebo effects. These also include harmful effects, so-called nocebo effects. Over the years, I then delved deeper into the subject because I wanted to know what was actually proven in this field and what was just speculation. Just recently, I have come across many new results and some amazing things.

What has amazed you the most?
That the same brain centers are activated in the mind of the doctor as in the mind of the patient when it comes to placebo effects. This has been studied primarily in the treatment of pain. It seems that the doctor must first empathize with the patient’s pain. Then, with this idea, he can activate his own pain-suppressing systems, and that in turn is transferred to the patient. This ability of the doctor correlates closely with his ability to empathize, as can be measured in psychological tests. In my lecture, I went into more detail about the corresponding research results.

Placebo effects in pain suppression result from the interaction between patients and doctors. Pain activates so-called pain centers in the brain (yellow star), as shown by functional magnetic resonance imaging. When empathic doctors come together with such patients, they in turn activate the same centers in the brain. However, they can also activate their own pain-suppressing centers in their brain (blue symbol). This is transferred to patients and leads to the activation of pain-suppressing nerves in them, which release endogenous opioids and other transmitters in the body and thus produce the pain-suppressing placebo effect. This effect occurs regardless of whether the drug administered to the patient contains an analgesic active ingredient or whether it is a pure placebo.

What does this mean for medical practice?
Doctors who are able to put themselves in their patients’ shoes can achieve a great deal with empathy in the reciprocal relationship. It would be good if we could use such placebo effects more systematically and on a reasoned basis, not just intuitively and based on personal experience. That’s why we should increase knowledge in this field and incorporate it more into the training of doctors and pharmacists. 

Can empathy, which obviously plays a major role, be taught and learned at all?
Some things are a matter of talent, but others can be learned. Since empathy is a core skill for therapists, it should be incorporated into the entire training program. The current courses in medical psychology for prospective doctors are a start. 

How far has placebo research come?
Compared to many other areas of medicine, it is still in its infancy. We have only been able to speak of serious, scientifically based placebo research for about three decades. It is an area where medicine, psychology and the new imaging techniques come together. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, in particular, gives us an idea of what is happening in the minds of patients and therapists. So, placebo research is making progress and Germany is playing an important role in it. Four years ago, for example, a national special research area was set up that has already led to a number of interesting results.

© MIKA-fotografie | Berlin

Great interest from the audience: After the lecture, there were many questions and comments on the placebo effect.  

So far, placebos have mainly been used in drug studies to find out whether drugs work compared to them. Do we also learn something from this about how placebos work?
Not really, because in such studies, the placebo arm only serves as a background against which the effect of a drug is to be shown. But treatment with placebos is not neutral. This is shown by studies with open placebos, in which patients know that they are receiving a placebo but still feel a healing effect. There are probably many types of placebo effects – just as there are countless drugs. In the future, we should characterize these in detail and examine their interactions.

A few more words about drug trials: it is rare for a verum to be tested against a placebo alone. If an effective drug already exists, giving a dummy drug is prohibited on ethical grounds. In these cases, the standard treatment plus a placebo is tested against the standard treatment plus a new drug. This makes it more difficult for new drugs to gain market approval: they not only have to work themselves, but also have to provide an additional benefit to standard therapy. 

Let’s take a closer look at the placebo effect: what do we know about its psychological and biological basis?
Psychologically, the expectations of patients are important. Both positive and negative expectations have a strong influence on the success of treatment – therapy with nothing, so to speak, is based on our expectations. We still know very little about the biological processes involved. What we do know is that placebos increase the activity of certain brain regions. For example, when it comes to pain suppression, placebos activate precisely those regions and neural pathways in the brain that are responsible for controlling pain perception. 

Do you need pills for the placebo effect or is positive expectation enough?
Pills, with or without active ingredients, or other specific measures such as acupuncture have a placebo effect. The best approach is a good medicine combined with positive expectations. Most studies show that a medicine plus placebo works twice as well as a placebo alone. 

For which illnesses is the placebo effect greatest?
The effect has been well studied for pain, especially for migraine, for functional disorders of the gastrointestinal tract, and in general for disorders with a strong psychosomatic component. Even depression can often be alleviated with placebos. This effect has been convincingly demonstrated and it is what makes studies on antidepressants so difficult. 

For which diseases should the placebo effect not be relied upon?
Whenever you know that there are drugs with a good verum effect, whose ingredients have been shown to help against a specific disease. In this case, you have to use the verum – knowing that its effect will be supplemented by placebo effects. If you don’t do that as a doctor, for example in cancer therapy, it becomes dangerous. This is also the strongest criticism of controversial forms of therapy such as homeopathy. 

More than a few patients report amazing healing successes with homeopathic remedies. What is your opinion on this?
Good homeopaths know how to use placebo effects efficiently. The effect of homeopathy is based on this, and not on the almost infinitely diluted medicines that are used. I think it is nonsense to ascribe verum effects to these remedies. 

What is the future of the placebo effect?
I expect to see a lot of new findings soon. And I hope that we will identify and understand very different placebo effects and mechanisms, and that we will be able to draw practical conclusions for training and therapeutic practice.