When the “MHH” is mentioned in the Lower Saxony state capital, everyone knows: it’s about the “Hanover Medical University”, the dilapidated concrete giant in the east of the city. Among the university hospitals, the MHH is considered to be a research-oriented maximum care provider and is known for its transplants. A second, tongue-in-cheek resolution is circulating for MHH in Hanover: Manns, Haverich, Haller. This alludes to the influence of these three respected professors in the clinic. Liver specialist Michael Manns leads the MHH as President. Kidney doctor Hermann Haller retired from the MHH in 2022 and is now continuing his research as head of an institute in America. The third professor is Axel Haverich, an award-winning surgeon who is retiring at the end of March and will be publishing an autobiography in a few days entitled The Human Factor: A Surgeon on the Lost Art of Healing. The 69-year-old professor is an MHH veteran.
Haverich is accordingly firmly anchored in urban society, especially in Gerhard Schröder’s orbit. Haverich also shares Schröder’s passion for Russia and, like the former chancellor, is one of the international feathers that people in Putin’s empire like to adorn themselves with. Haverich once operated on Boris Yeltsin’s heart and later did research with Russian doctors.
The Russian attack brought such research collaborations to an abrupt end. The German side terminated the cooperation immediately after February 24, 2022. The Leopoldina, of which Haverich is a member, announced a day after the attack that “all members of the Alliance of German Science Organizations, including the Leopoldina, have frozen institutional relations with Russia.” The German Rectors’ Conference declared the “end of joint research projects”. The specifications of the federal and state ministries point in a similar direction.
The MHH also followed this course. On March 2, 2022, President Manns instructed all employees that “all research collaborations with Russia will be frozen until further notice, active collaborations will be suspended and no new collaborations will be entered into.” Manns also ordered an “immediate stop to payments and services or the exchange of scientific papers and documents”. As a researcher with particularly close ties to Russia, Axel Haverich must have known about it.
Two announcements on the website of the University of St. Petersburg from June 29 and July 26, 2022 are all the more surprising: The university celebrates that it has won three of the coveted “Mega Grants”, each with more than one million euros are endowed. Of all the Russian universities, St. Petersburg did best. In the field of medicine, Axel Haverich’s project was approved. The clinic director of the “Hannover Medical School” will set up a laboratory in Russia to research arteriosclerosis.
The mega grant is not an everyday prize, but is one of Moscow’s prestige projects. Putin even received some winners in Sochi in 2019 to talk to them about his “presidential program” mega-grant. He explained that the “guiding principle” includes the involvement of foreign scientists.
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