Many scientists know their career leanings from an early age. Walter Rosenthal did not. Then, at the age of 19, while driving an ambulance for the German Red Cross, he discovered his vocation in medicine. See CV

Rosenthal is amazed by how far his interest in medicine and pharmacology has taken him. As the new scientific director of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, he will follow his translational-research mantra: turn basic science into clinical solutions.

While studying medicine at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Rosenthal assumed he would become a general practitioner. “I didn't know research was an option when I first started my education,” he says. His chats with pharmacologists introduced him to the demanding, open discussions inherent to research. He went on to develop assays to detect cellular signalling molecules as part of a research thesis.

A postdoc spent primarily at the Free University of Berlin would prove crucial. Working with pharmacologist Günter Schultz, Rosenthal began isolating and characterizing G proteins, a large family of cell-surface signalling proteins. “I was lucky to enter the field of G proteins when it was exploding with opportunities,” he says.

Rosenthal returned to his medical roots when Mariel Birnbaumer, a colleague at Baylor University in Houston, Texas, invited him to help clone a receptor implicated in diabetes insipidus. Later he identified gene mutations in patients with a congenital form of the disease. Molecular medicine has been Rosenthal's career pursuit ever since.

Although he had just established a lab at the University of Giessen, Rosenthal couldn't resist an invitation to lead the Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) in Berlin. “I was attracted to the FMP by the idea of having pharmacologists, structural biologists, chemists and molecular geneticists all under one roof,” he says.

But first he had to move the former East German institute to its current location near the MDC in Berlin-Buch. Detlev Ganten, former chief executive of Berlin's Charité hospital, says Rosenthal had the academic standing, demeanour and stature to overcome the political and infrastructure hurdles.

Rosenthal plans to expand the MDC's study of systems biology and forge translational-research collaborations in cardiovascular disease. “There is no recipe to best connect excellent basic research with clinical medicine,” he says. “But we have to improve it somehow.”