Peter Badge has taken more than 500 such portraits of Nobel Prize winners. For 25 years, the renowned photographer has been traveling around the world on behalf of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings Foundation, meeting the brightest minds of our time in person and capturing them on camera. This has resulted in the now internationally renowned exhibition “Nobel Heroes,” which was recently on display for four weeks at Campus Heilbronn of the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Analog photography and talking avatars

The grand finale was the closing event in the modern, minimalist ambience of the Open Space of Arkadia Heilbronn. A highlight was the talk between Dr. Sarah Schwab-Jung, head of the office at TUM Heilbronn Campus, and Peter Badge. The photographer thanked TUM Campus Heilbronn and, in particular, the organizers Sarah Schwab-Jung and Anja Köhler for the great collaboration. He said he felt at home in Heilbronn and predicted that in the future there would be both expressive analog photography and artificial intelligence—for example, in the form of communicating avatars.

One such device was then presented to the audience: Prof. Louis J. Ignarro’s avatar can answer questions as if it were the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine himself. Another item on the program was a talk on “The Future Campus: empowering students, skills, and innovation” with Gero von Manstein, Head of Student Council at TUM School of Computation, Information, and Technology on Campus Heilbronn, Reihaneh Moradi, Head of Talent Development at TUM Business Games Heilbronn, and Patrick Fuchs, Product Development Lead at Arkadia Heilbronn. The diverse program was rounded off by impressive performances by singer Julian Pförtner and acrobat Vera Ruzhentcova.

Through deep valleys to a major breakthrough

The vernissage also took place at the same location. One highlight was the lecture given by the 2014 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Prof. Dr. Stefan W. Hell. The inventor of the high-resolution STED microscope had to walk through numerous valleys: while writing his doctoral thesis at the University of Heidelberg, he earned money with a monotonous part-time job. After successfully completing his doctorate, he took a postdoctoral position in Turku, Finland, which barely paid enough to live on. But it was precisely these years of hardship that brought him an important realization: “It’s better to do what you enjoy than to be guided only by rational and financial considerations. Real breakthroughs always have economic value.”

The big breakthrough was also to come for Hell. During his time in Turku, he made a revolutionary discovery: by selectively switching individual light molecules on and off, he managed to fall below the previously unbreakable resolution limit of the light microscope of 200 nanometers (i.e., 200 millionths of a millimeter) – it was the birth of the STED microscope. He published his findings in 1994, but 30 universities rejected his application.

The Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen finally hired him. This marked the beginning of a decades-long success story: Hell brought the STED microscope to market with the biotechnology company Abberior, a spin-off from the MPI. He further developed it with the so-called MINFLUX method, which makes protein movements visible. The rest is history: in 2014, an invitation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to Stockholm was waiting in his mailbox. Today, Abberior employs 110 people at four locations worldwide. Hell is the director of the MPI for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen and the MPI for Medical Research in Heidelberg.

Stay true to yourself and see it through to the end

The following panel discussion, “Excellence, Leadership, Inspiration,” also highlighted that successful individuals from a wide variety of fields often have to fight for their ideas and passions, but that it is still worth persevering. The panel included actress Uschi Glas, Dr. Teresa Wagner, CEO of immuneAdvice GmbH, national hockey player Sonja Zimmermann, Stefan W. Hell, Prof. Jürgen Kluge, Chairman of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings Foundation, and Prof. Hans Peter Mengele, Managing Director of the GLA European Leadership Center. Mengele praised Hell’s presentation, which he said was a true leadership speech: “It was about how you led yourself. The first team you led was yourself.” Kluge emphasized that this requires enormous willpower: “All the Nobel Prize winners I have met have gone all the way. Compromises are often good in normal life, but real progress is made with radical solutions.”

Zimmermann agreed: “You have to make many sacrifices to pursue your childhood dream. Half measures do not bring success.” “You have to stay true to yourself and be your own best friend,” said Glas, who passionately promoted her project “brotzeit e. V.,” which provides daily breakfast to around 21,000 children in need throughout Germany. “You need courage, because you hear ‘no’ so often when you go out there,” Wagner reported. The doctor of pharmacy wants to use her medical start-up to generate image data from a new contrast agent. This data is intended to make it easier to decide whether immunotherapy is an option for a particular cancer patient.