Annual report and yearbook 2019 published

The Max Planck Society regularly publishes an annual report with current facts and figures. Due to changes in management principles, since 2016 there has been an obligation to publish a balance sheet, a statement of profit and loss, an appendix, a management report, and an auditors' report. As a result, the annual report now comprises over 160 pages. In addition to the extensive economic data, the report also contains a summary of the new appointments to the Max Planck Society in 2019 and the technology transfer activities by the Max Planck Society’s technology transfer institution, Max Planck Innovation. The main topic in 2019 was genome editing: last year, the MPG publicly positioned itself with a comprehensive discussion paper and a statement derived from it.

The annual report, as a rendering account to our funding agencies and the public, is completed with the highlights from the Max Planck Society's Yearbook.

For this printed collection, 15 articles were selected and edited in a journalistic manner, which seemed particularly suited for publication from a science communication perspective and especially interesting for non-experts. Among the highlights of the 2019 yearbook are, for example, research findings that make it possible to predict the frequency of malaria parasites in a local mosquito population. They provide the basis for new biotechnological strategies to combat malaria – an almost Herculean task in view of steadily growing insecticide resistance and the sheer size of the world’s malaria regions. Using data from the social network Facebook, researchers have tracked migration movements from Puerto Rico to the USA following Hurricane Maria in the autumn of 2017. In doing so, they gained new information that traditional data sources such as statistical authorities cannot provide. And that the development from an assisted to a fully automated vehicle might not progress so quickly is shown by studies into research for motion analysis, which is considered a likely component of future autonomous vehicles. Researchers found that even small interfering signals confuse it, thus reducing the reliability with which a vehicle can navigate in its surroundings

The online version of the annual report is available as PDF. You can find the yearbook here. Printed copies of both publications are available from the Communication Department on request (presse@gv.mpg.de).