Dr. Klaus Herberger Inaugurates Carl Zeiss Sponsorship
Herberger during his keynote address "Knowledge is the Key to the Future"
The third day of the “Computational Neuroscience and the Hybrid Brain” conference marked the official inauguration of the sponsorship of the Carl Zeiss Foundation.The Carl Zeiss Foundation supports the Bernstein Center Freiburg (BCF) at the University of Freiburg in developing and implementing new research approaches that employ computer-based and mathematical methods. The funds granted in 2014, which amount to 750,000 Euro, are allowing scientists to carry out important build-up work for developing and implementing new research approaches over the next four years. In his inaugural address, Dr. Klaus Herberger not only underlined the outstanding scientific accomplishments of the Bernstein Center, but further drew a historical connection with the Carl Zeiss Foundation, reaching back well into the 19th century.
Honoring Julius Bernstein for his groundbreaking “membrane theory”, Herberger remarked that his finding would not likely have been possible without the contribution of Ernst Abbe, Bernstein’s contemporary and founder of the Carl Zeiss Foundation, whose discovery of a sine condition enabled a new generation of microscope and the aberration-free display of images. “Julius Bernstein and Ernst Abbe may well have known each other”, Herberger remarks, further pointing to their membership at the German Academy of Scientists, the Leopoldina, which they joined only two years apart. “It is also quite probable that when performing his scientific work, Julius Bernstein used a Carl Zeiss microscope that Ernst Abbe had constructed.”
With the sponsorship for the Bernstein Center in Freiburg through the Carl Zeiss Foundation the paths of these two great scientists cross once again, Herberger said. Ernst Abbe's legacy, the Carl Zeiss Foundation, has supported the natural sciences and engineering at colleges and universities for over 125 years. With the current sponsorship, the Carl Zeiss Foundation wants to strengthen the neuroscientific competencies of the Bernstein Center in Freiburg for the future by enhancing research into neurological and psychiatric illnesses combined with fundamental responsibility and ethical competence.
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Herberger during his keynote address "Knowledge is the Key to the Future"