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The institute was opened in 1930 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, and was re-founded as a Max-Planck Institute in 1948. Its original goal was to apply the methods of physics and chemistry to basic medical research, and it included departments of Chemistry, Physiology, and Biophysics. Since the 1960s, new developments in biology were reflected with the establishment of additional departments. The institute currently holds the three departments molecular neurobiology, biomedical optics, and biomolecular mechanisms as well as the two independent junior research groups behavioural neurophysiology and developmental genetics. One of the future activities of the institute will be to investigate nerve cells and their connections in the cerebral cortex that are responsible for the reception and processing of signals from the sense organs, i.e. smell, sight, and taste, with the use of molecular genetics, physiological and imaging techniques. Scientists are particularly interested in the nature of synapses, the contact points between nerve cells in the neural network. How information is stored and retrieved in synapses, how new synapses are formed, and how superfluous synapses are removed are all topics of investigation. Research will involve the development of new genetic engineering techniques, so that the activity of the key molecules involved in rapid information transmission between nerve cells by the synapses can be regulated. There are plans to miniaturize multiquantum microscopy and improve the level of penetration to measure activity in the cerebral cortex of freely moving mice.
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