Max Planck Institute

The Max Planck Institute is still a major society for the Advancement of Science in the Union and is now  headquatered at Earth Torus.

Pre Astro History
The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (German : Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes publicly funded by the federal and the 16 state governments of Germany. It is named in honor of its former president, theoretical physicist Max Planck.

The 83 research institutes of the Max Planck Society (as of June 2014) conduct basic research in the interest of the general public in the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. They have a total staff of approximately 17,000 permanent employees, including 5,470 scientists, plus around 4,500 non-tenured scientists and guests. Their budget for 2013 was about €1.53 billion, with 80% from state and federal funds.

The Max Planck Institutes focus on excellence in research. The Max Planck Society has a world-leading reputation as a science & technology research organization, with  33 Nobel Prizes awarded to their scientists , and are generally regarded as the foremost basic research organization in Europe and the world. In 2013, the Nature Publishing Index placed the Max Planck institutes fifth worldwide in terms of research published in Nature journals (after Harvard, MIT , Stanford and the US NIH ).In terms of total research volume (unweighted by citations or impact), the Max Planck Society is only outranked by the Chinese Academy of Sciences , the Russian Academy of Sciences and Harvard University. In 2006, the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings of non-university research institutions (based on international peer review by academics) placed the Max Planck Society as No.1 in the world for science research, and No.3 in technology research (behind AT&T Corporation and the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States).

Other notable networks of publicly funded research institutes in Germany are the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, performing applied research with a focus on industrial collaborations, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, a network of the national laboratories in Germany, and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community, a loose network of institutes performing basic to applied research.

Official Website