The chemist Patrick Cramer is the new President of the Max Planck Society. Lack of young talent, gender equality, science denial: In an interview with the SZ, he explains how he wants to deal with it.
Patrick Cramer is sitting in his new office in Munich, with a view of the Frauenkirche, blue jacket, white shirt, no tie, with a neatly sorted stack of paper in the background. He used to be at home in the laboratory, but now he is the boss of a good 24,000 employees. In the past nine months he has visited 84 Max Planck Institutes (MPI). He was already very familiar with the 85th, the MPI for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen. He was a director there until he took office as President of the Max Planck Society (MPG). MPG press spokeswoman Christina Beck also took part in the video call.