Sir

In your News feature “The missionary from Munich” ( Nature 405, 10; 2000), Rudi Balling, the incoming director of the German Research Centre for Biotechnology (GBF), calls the centre a “gold mine”. Yet you, on the other hand, unkindly refer to it as an “underachiever”. Presumably this is intended to mean that the gold mine has not yet been properly exploited.

This is not the case. The the GBF mine has not only produced gold bars, but has turned these into numerous pieces of jewellery and sold them to jewellers. Over many years, scientific contributions from this institute have been published in excellent journals, not least in Nature (see Hattori et al. Nature 405, 311; 2000).

The high standard of GBF's research and development is also reflected by an internal evaluation of the German Helmholtz centres, in which the GBF was one of the top-scoring institutes by all the criteria used. In addition to this, the December 99/January 00 issue of Biotech International compared a long list of biotech companies (such as Bayer and the Roche Group) and research institutions (such as the Max Planck Society) outside the United States: the GBF was ranked twenty-fourth. If normalized according to number of personnel, the GBF, which has only 600 employees, would appear in the top ten. Hardly the performance of an underachiever.

The GBF does have one major drawback. Its full name — Gesellschaft für biotechnologische Forschung mit beschränkter Haftung — doesn't exactly roll off German tongues, let alone those that don't speak the language. How much easier life would be if the GBF were, for example, renamed the Eigen Centre (after Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen, one of its main founders). But although a name change might raise the institute's public profile, high visibility should not be confused with high quality.