A bestseller featuring WSS-funded projects
Entrepreneur and bestselling author Dirk Rossmann has recently published a new book. Together with his co-author, biologist Josef Settele, he presents ten ideas that have the potential to change the world. Notably, no less than four of the innovative projects have been, or are currently being, financed by the Werner Siemens Foundation.
Whatever Dirk Rossmann touches turns to gold. In 1972, he founded the first self-service store for health and beauty products—and what began as a small business in Hanover evolved over the years into the Rossmann retail chain, an enterprise with some five thousand shops and more than sixty-five thousand employees in nine European countries. Then, a few years ago, the now seventy-eight-year-old tried his hand as an author with equal success: his three eco-thrillers have all been bestsellers.
With the publication of his first non-fiction work this spring, Rossmann has once again upped up his game. He and biologist Josef Settele wrote Keine Zeit für Pessimismus (No time for pessimism) to inspire hope in these difficult times. A laudable aim, as many of us are succumbing to fear and resignation in the face of war, climate change and the general upheaval pervading society. In their book, the authors introduce readers to visionary thinkers whose ideas promise a more optimistic future.
In one of the projects, a Paderborn man is devising a way to collect microplastics swimming in the ocean using a technology that functions with tiny bubbles. The authors also introduce a woman in a Danish insect factory who is creating the animal feed (and maybe even human food) of the future. Another clever idea stems from a professor emeritus in Greifswald who spares no effort in ensuring that drained moorlands are restored and conserved for future generations. And a retired school director in Leipzig is developing a learning format that enables children to explore the big issues of the future on their own.
Palm oil replacement and antibiotics from the Stone Age
The authors also dedicate several fascinating chapters to five professors who are well known at the Werner Siemens Foundation (WSS): Thomas Brück (Munich), Pierre Stallforth (Jena), and Jürg Leuthold (Zurich) as well as Regina Palkovits and Jürgen Klankermayer (both Aachen)—all of whom lead pioneering research projects that have been awarded long-term funding from the Foundation.
Synthetic biotechnology is the research field of Professor Thomas Brück, whose professorship at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) was financed by the Foundation for a five-year period (2016 to 2021). In their portrait of Brück, Rossmann and Settele focus on one of his most promising ideas: a palm oil replacement made of yeast cells. If they succeed in realising industrial-scale production of the yeast-based oil at a competitive price, Thomas Brück and his team will help prevent further deforestation of the rainforests for growing palm oil plantations.
The authors also visited biotechnologist Pierre Stallforth at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, where he leads the “Palaeobiotechnology” project with Professor Christina Warinner, molecular archaeologist at Harvard University. The project has received a ten-year WSS grant (2020 to 2029) to support the Jena team in their search for urgently needed new antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. The revolutionary aspect of the endeavour is where they’re looking for these substances—in the dental plaque of Neanderthals and other early humans. Using newly developed methods, the team are reconstructing the blueprints of bacterial antibiotic material preserved in ancient dental calculus.
Efficient electronics, sustainable plastics
At ETH Zurich, Jürg Leuthold is experimenting on a solution to a very different, yet equally interesting and crucial problem. He envisions reducing the energy consumed in electronic data processing by a factor of one hundred to one thousand. He plans to achieve his ambitious aim via a radical miniaturisation of electronic circuits and transistors. Whereas today’s technology requires thousands of electrons to switch a transistor on or off, his single-atom switch can do the job with just one single atom—as the name suggests. The Werner Siemens Foundation began financing the project in 2017; the funding period has been extended to 2029.
Unsurprisingly, the two authors also travelled to RWTH Aachen University to visit catalaix, the Foundation’s “project of the century”, which is led by Regina Palkovits and Jürgen Klankermayer. The project was awarded WSS funding of one hundred million Swiss francs for a ten-year period (2024 to 2034). The overarching aim of the Aachen researchers is making the chemical industry more sustainable, and the key to their endeavour lies in the novel catalysis methods they’re developing to break down materials, mainly plastics, into their individual chemical components. These building blocks can then be recycled and fed into a multidimensional circular economy. If the project succeeds, plastics will no longer end up in landfills, incinerators or—yet worse—the ocean at the end of their life-cycle; instead, they’ll be recycled as valuable raw materials.
The book
Dirk Rossmann, Josef Settele: Keine Zeit für Pessimismus – Ideen für eine bessere Welt. 264 pages. Quadriga, 2025. ISBN: 978-3-86995-158-4.
