My take on the 74th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Chemistry.
The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. A name that carries some depth, that elicits the raising of an eyebrow. You? There? Really. Huh.
Well, I was lucky enough to be selected by the Klaus-Tschira-Stiftung for this honor. But I don’t want to dwell on the selection process, complicated and convoluted and probably unfair that it is. I want to highlight the expectations I had: Nobel Laureates and some of the most talented and highly achieving young scientists in the world. What a meeting that must be! What inspiring thoughts they all might share, what insightful questions they all might ask. And me in the middle, how can I possibly keep pace?
Now, in retrospect, I can say: There was some of that. I met some great people and had some great discussions – for example with Derek from Veritasium, someone I might consider a role model. But mostly, the meeting was underwhelming. I want to illustrate this feeling in three points, two on the panel discussions we had and one on the young scientist’s wishes on how to change academia.
The first panel discussion: AI
Over the course of the event, there were three panel discussions: artificial intelligence in chemistry, sustainability and science diplomacy. I want to comment here on the first two, since the last one was more of a commercial for the importance of science diplomacy than an actual discussion.
The full title of the first panel was: “Artificial intelligence: How is AI changing the game?”. I interpreted this as a fairly broad discussion about AI in chemistry and chemical discoveries but also hoped for some comments on the effect on the people, who do the chemistry. Unfortunately, there was little to none of that. The discussion started with the question “What is artificial intelligence”. It stayed technical for quite some time. The importance of compute for an algorithm being called “intelligent” was discussed – or whether it is the learning aspect that makes it intelligent. Joachim Frank, Columbia University, USA, made his opinion on this part very clear: “I am actually not sure what we are discussing right now”. This comment stuck with me for the rest of the discussion as it remained as diffuse as it started. Maybe the theme was set too broadly? Maybe the moderator Derek Muller, YouTube channel Veritasium, should have stepped in more often and kept the panelists more closely to the questions he asked. I actually don’t think so. I think, the discussion was this diffuse because the subject as a whole was overwhelming for the panelists. It went over their heads. What I don’t mean: The panelists don’t know what AI is or how it works. I think there were too many experts who are too deep in the field of AI research to be able to assess its ramifications for the general field of chemistry and broader society.
When discussing AI, I immediately think about the implications of its use for peoples’ jobs, opinions, how student who use AI think and learn, and what it means for democracy. Even though I use ChatGPT a lot and consider myself somewhat of a technology enthusiast, I would have liked to discuss the question “Is AI worth it?”. Is the development of artificial intelligence and its use in research, for writing text, for generating images and videos worth the detrimental effects it has on our way of living together. Millions of ChatGPT and Claude powered bots flood the internet every day to spread hate, climate change denial and anti-vax propaganda. Even more critical than that: The possibility to create hyper-realistic deep fakes destroys trust in media in general – if anything can be a deep fake, how do I know what is real?
Maybe I got all of this wrong and just couldn’t understand the panelists’ points. The recording of the panel discussion can be viewed here, check it out!
What do I think should have been discussed? Which questions would I have asked? I’ll try to build it up starting from chemistry-centered to more societal questions:
- Do you think AI is necessary for further development of pharmaceuticals?
- Which developments in the specific field of AI in chemistry do you view critically?
- Are you at all worried about jobs being lost in the chemical or pharmaceutical industry?
- Do you think AI companies should be involved in remedying these lost jobs by, for example, paying higher taxes?
- Do you think generative AI models and tools are necessary for the further development of the chemical or pharmaceutical industry?
- Which developments in the field of generative AI do you view critically?
- Are you at all worried about the ramifications of generative AI tools?
And then, finally: Is AI worth it? Is the risk of AI worth its costs to democracy and society? Let me know what you think about all of these questions, if I missed an important one or if you disagree!
The second panel discussion: Sustainability
Now let’s move on to sustainability, which I think was an even bigger bummer. Steven Chu, Nobel Prize in Physics and former U.S. Secretary of Energy during the Obama administration, literally opened his statement by telling us he is driving his car only a little and that he changed his light bulbs to LEDs – most of them anyways. He, in addition to Sir. M Stanley Whittingham, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was also absolutely blown away by the fact that we used glass instead of plastic bottles during the conference. He mentioned this multiples times. He also said multiple times that THIS is how you do sustainability, that THIS is the way forward. Not a comment that the issue is slightly more complicated when taking transportation into account, not a comment that it is a teeny tiny part in the whole sustainability field barely worth mentioning! This I think stands for the entire panel discussion. If this is the level we discuss sustainability at a meeting with Nobel Laureates and some of the brightest young scientists in the world, we will not solve climate change.
Ben Feringa, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, also tried to tackle the plastic waste issue with materials that self-repair or that can be disassembled on command. Those are valuable technologies, I don’t have a single doubt. But this is only a very small part of the monstrous undertaking we are facing right now, i.e. getting our economy and society to be more sustainable. One of the biggest problems, probably the biggest problem, was hardly ever mentioned in the discussion though: climate change.
Action against climate change was mainly mentioned in the following setting: the Green Labs or LEAF initiatives. These are student-organized initiatives for reducing the footprint of a (bio)chemistry or physics lab. So scientists looking after themselves and their own use of plastics and energy. Which is a good thing! The lab I work in is also gold-certified in LEAF. I was actively pushing for this myself. I do think reducing plastic and energy waste is an absolutely necessary step on our way to a more sustainable future. But. Oh, so many buts – and I am a little surprised that I would need to write this in a reflection of such a high-tiered conference. There was virtually no vision for our path out of the current wasteful economy. Every comment, every point was centered around solving this particular problem or that small inefficiency. The most “visionary” topic was lithium ion batteries – the credo here was: don’t worry about it, we have technology, we now just need to wait a couple of years for it to get traction.
During the meeting, the organizers also selected one of the young scientists to join the panel. This young scientist was probably chosen because she herself works in sustainability research, so she was probably considered an expert – with the addition of being a young scientist: “I will do some thing and I will tell you about it.” This quote – whether misphrased due to nervousness or not – illustrates the complete lack of vision in the entire panel. There weren’t a lot of insightful comments, and I extracted the only weird one to make my point, no, this is fairly representative – not just of this young scientist but of the panel in general.
Therefore, here’s what I think was missing from the debate: First and foremost, our governments need to put laws in place that incentivize climate protection. Governments need to tax behavior that impacts the climate more. Governments need to stop subsidizing coal and oil and gas and kerosene and agricultural diesel and traveling long distances to work by car and so on and so forth. The problem with this statement is: We basically know what we need to do, it’s not that hard to think of. It’s just very hard to do. I mean, this has already been emphasized by the IPCC in their 2022 report: the window for limiting global warming is rapidly closing, and immediate structural action is needed across all sectors.1 But if Nobel Laureates and sustainability experts hardly ever mention politics in their panel discussions and shift the blame to young researchers who didn’t get their lab LEAF certified, we will never change. It would not have been difficult to do differently. There have already been two declarations by the Lindau Nobel Laureate meetings, one in 1955 and the other in 2024, both on nuclear weapons. How hard would it have been to make a Lindau declaration of sustainability?
The most remarkable statement in the entire debate was made by Stan Whittingham: He pointed out that nowadays, no industrial lab is doing basic research or would even be capable of doing basic research – in difference to his early career when he worked at Bell labs. This revelation, that the entire burden of finding solutions to the plastic waste issue and climate change rests on the shoulders of academic research, which is chronically underfunded, was not commented upon by anyone. I strongly believe that if we as a society want to change, we need to get industry on board. The times when companies reap gigantic profits while investing almost nothing in basic research need to be over. Restructuring society to be more sustainable does not only mean more electric vehicles and solar power, it also means rethinking the way we work together.
At the end of the discussion, the floor was opened to questions. A fellow young scientist expressed her confusion about the tone of the debate, about the shifting of the blame to the individual and away from political leadership. This remained the only comment in that direction. I wanted to ask why there is no Lindau Declaration of Sustainability but time unfortunately ran out. I don’t know how I can be optimistic about our future with such a panel discussion reflecting the state of the discussion among top tier researchers.
So, what do we need? Well: Clear political statements. Joint declarations. Shared responsibility between academia, industry and politics. Willingsness to stand up to pressure.
A question that came up in a series of conversations I had after the panel discussion is the following: If you had the choice, would you rather A) have a world without the plastic waste problem but with uncombatted climate change or B) a world without climate change but plastic waste. I know what I would choose. Let me know what you think!
You can watch the recording here if you are interested.
Some final remarks
By no means do I want to call out any young scientist specifically. I don’t think most of us would have done any better than the people chosen to participate in the panel discussions. My point is that the current education system does not generate the amount of critical thinking I think should be deeply embedded and even should form the basis of a scientist’s point of view. My point is that the community does not have a vision. We basically all agree: We need to act on climate change. We need to speed up our climate protection activities. We need to critically question developments in artificial intelligence. But how do we approach this, what are the deep questions we should ask?
At the risk of repeating myself: I do not want to sound ungrateful. I am deeply honored to have been chosen to represent Klaus-Tschira-Stiftung at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 2025. However, I think seeing these problems and not talking about them would be doing no one a favor. I am a scientist at heart. Always curious, always critical. I question nearly everything I hear, so I also questioned everything in Lindau. And I was not convinced. I did not hear a vision, an idea of a path forward, a common thread to pull on. We, as some of the most educated people on this planet, owe it to humanity to do better – not only in our science, but in how we shape its impact on the world.. This is the reason why I am sharing my perspectives.
There are also a couple of other issues that might merit some discussion. Starting from the elitist nature of the meeting, the opaque selection process or the fact that German conservative politicians got away praising science while at the same time working against all climate protection action in Germany. Maybe I’ll just have to write another article as this one is quite long already.
Well, this is it. My take on the 74th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Chemistry in 2025. Let me know what you think about it!
1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022). Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/