Here, I want to mention the international monitoring of nuclear energy experiments. This, of course, can only be done by international scientific technical agreement and cooperation, besides the political agreement. The second field which probably will become even more important in the future are science based agreements on cooperation and limitation of gene manipulation and cloning. These problems can only be solved after providing the scientific-technical background, if there is a global agreement that they have to be solved, and that we have to cooperate globally, simply for reasons of the survival of mankind. The second general area of international collaborative research which I want to discuss is the area where international cooperation is not absolutely necessary but simply is better and attractive.
International collaboration is simply better.
Nevertheless, we all know the advantages and attractiveness of research collaboration with an institute or with a coworker from abroad in our group from our daily work. I will first give some general arguments and then I will give examples of how international cooperation had a decisive impact on my own scientific career and work. I will frame my very general arguments for the advantages of international cooperation in research into the following general statements. A Japanese scientist, for example, will look at a problem somewhat differently and has a different emphasis on various aspects of it than a Russian scientist, an American scientist, a west-European scientist or a Chinese scientist may have. Such partners are often not available in the home country.