Nobel Laureate Meetings at Lindau - History

History

In 1951, the two physicians Gustav Parade and Franz Karl Hein from Lindau convinced the Swedish Count Lennart Bernadotte of Wisborg, living near Lindau, to assume patronage of the scientific meeting they were setting up to facilitate German students the exchange with Nobel laureates of medicine. During the turmoil of World War II, Germany had been largely excluded from worldwide scientific exchange. The initiative soon enjoyed considerable success as many Laureates accepted the invitation of Count Lennart to meet in Lindau, close to his castle on the isle of Mainau in Lake Constance. Over the years the meetings grew, and laureates from all three scientific Nobel disciplines, physiology or medicine, chemistry and physics were also invited. Each year in turn, the Lindau Meetings were devoted specifically to one of these disciplines. From the 1970s, also winners of the Nobel prize for economics began to join the meetings occasionally.

Since 1954, the meetings are organized by the Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. Count Lennart became the Counci's first president.

At the age of eighty, in 1989, Count Lennart resigned from chairing the meetings and his much younger wife Countess Sonja Bernadotte became head of the meeting's Council. She demonstrated in doing so how firmly the Bernadotte family was committed to continue the tradition of the Lindau Meetings, considering the fact that the grandfather of Count Lennart, Gustav V., was the first Swedish King to award the Nobel Prize at Stockholm in 1905. Countess Sonja successfully increased the international significance of the events by inviting about 600 university trainees every year from an increasing number of countries world-wide, by introducing a Joint Assembly of Laureates of the three scientific Nobel disciplines together every five years, and by establishing the 'Foundation Lindau Nobel Prizewinners Meeting at Lake Constance', in the year 2000. Thanks to this foundation the Council of the Lindau Meetings finally disposed of a solid financial basis for the organization of the yearly meetings. Count Lennart died in 2004 and his wife Countess Sonja Bernadotte in 2008. Since then their daughter Countess Bettina Bernadotte is head of the Council.

Recently, the Lindau Meetings Council biannually organises in addition to the yearly meetings on natural sciences as well a separate conference for Nobel Laureates in economics with students from all over the world.