No time in a scientific career feels lonelier than the limbo reserved for postdocs on the bumpy road to tenure. This is particularly true in Germany, with its hierarchy that segregates the tenured 'haves' from the 'have-nots'.

The Young Academy, founded in 2000, each year brings ten young scientists out of this isolation. A joint venture of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Leopoldina Society, it is funded by the German education and research ministry. Membership is for five years and is open to any German academic who has received a PhD in the previous three to seven years; selection aims to be purely merit-based. Members receive some grant money but are not guaranteed positions. The goals are modest: interdisciplinary exchange, outreach to society, and giving young scientists a unified voice. Yet, after five years, the results have been unique.

At a time when top-down reforms in European higher education and research are politically driven, the Young Academy stands out as a fruitful grassroots approach to bringing scientists from disparate fields together. Our activities have included launching the first large-scale study of the effects of Germany's reformed tenure system on career development and interdisciplinary projects involving, for example, neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers.

Implementing these activities was often laborious, but for many members, this was the first chance to interact with scientists outside our own fields. For me as a physicist, exposure to the conceptual sophistication of the humanities was an education in precision beyond formulae. I revelled in learning first-hand about current malaria research and the workings of bee vision; as a young scientist, I felt my voice was heard.

The Young Academy is too new and reaches too far beyond disciplinary borders to help much with individual career advancement. But its real raison d'être ranges beyond job opportunities: to help young scientists develop a fuller view of the scientific universe; to give this view human meaning by associating it with faces and friends; to remind them that science is an endeavour of freely organized minds; and to urge them to take this spirit to the scientific community at large. I recommend other countries to follow this example. Young academies may be a way to give the old idea of scientific academies a second lease of life.