‘Two miles north-east of Berlin is the village of Buch, rich in that quiet but appealing landscape of which Brandenburg has so much to offer, yet even richer in history.’ Theodor Fontane

Buch developed from an old settlement on an ancient stream, the Panke. Until the close of the 19th century it was a sleepy Brandenburg village which had everything required of a rural idyll: a handful of farmers’ cottages, a manor house (Schloss Buch), an inn, a large park, a Baroque church – and 280 inhabitants.

The city of Berlin purchased the estate in 1898 and commissioned its City Building Officer, Ludwig Hoffmann, to construct a hospital site there. This was to be the basis for Buch’s development into one of the largest medical healthcare locations in Europe – Buch’s population had already risen to 20,000 by 1920.

After Oskar and Cécile Vogt founded the Brain Research Institute in Buch, which performed pioneering work in genetic research, radiology and X-ray diagnosis, Buch evolved from a purely therapeutic location into a site for research and training.

Everything changed in the 1930s when the Third Reich came to Buch. A memorial is dedicated to the victims of the Nazi atrocities. After 1945 the Akademie der Wissenschaften (Academy of Sciences), with a focus on cancer and cardiovascular research, was set up in Buch.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Science Council opened the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine. The close networking of basic and clinical research together with the MDC created the ideal foundation for the development of the internationally renowned science, technology and healthcare location which Berlin-Buch has become today.