Editorial

Holger Becker

Dr Holger Becker is co-founder and CSO of microfluidic ChipShop GmbH. He obtained physics degrees from the University of Western Australia/Perth and the University of Heidelberg. He started to work on miniaturized systems for chemical analysis during his PhD thesis at Heidelberg University, where he obtained his PhD in 1995. Between 1995 and 1997 he was a Research Associate at Imperial College with Prof. Andreas Manz. In 1998 he joined Jenoptik Mikrotechnik GmbH. Since then, he founded and led several companies in the field of microsystem technologies in medicine and the life sciences. He lead the Industry Group of the German Physical Society between 2004 and 2009, and is the current chair of the SPIE “Microfluidics, BioMEMS and Medical Microsystems” conference as well as acting as a regular reviewer of project proposals on a national and international level.

Andreas Manz

Andreas Manz obtained his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland, with Professor W. Simon. His thesis dealt with the use of microelectrodes as detectors for picolitre-size volumes. Manz conducted most of his early research with his group at Ciba-Geigy Ltd. in Basel, Switzerland, Imperial College in London, United Kingdom, and then at ISAS (the Institute for Analytical Sciences), Dortmund Germany. In 2009, he was appointed head of research at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Saarbrücken, Germany. He has published over 220 papers in scientific journals, which are cited over 11,000 times. In addition, he is inventor in 39 patents. He was the Founding Member and Chairman of the Editorial Board of Lab on a Chip and served on the Editorial Board until 2008. His research interests include fluid handling and detection principles for chemical analysis, bioassays, and synthesis using microfabricated devices.

Acting as Guest Editors for the 10th Anniversary issue: Focus on Germany has been both a pleasure and a challenge. A pleasure obviously as it is an honourable task to showcase the advances made in the field of microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip science and technology by German research groups. A challenge however due to the multitude of aspects covered by the large and growing numbers of groups active in the field. This multifaceted landscape reflects several aspects which can be used to characterize German academic research as well as the industrial development scene. For one, Germany is a federal republic and the individual German “Länder” (federal states) have fiscal and political sovereignty over the educational systems, including the universities. This leads to a comparatively large number of places where research is conducted compared with only a few years ago, when German policies were oriented more towards a broader distribution of funds and a rather egalitarian approach, all embedded in a rather classical departmental university structure. In recent years, massive changes have effected the German academic landscape: more competition; the concentration of funding for “Elite-Universitäten” with the political task to create a German “ivy-league”; and the substitution of the traditional German main degree in the natural sciences, the “Diplom”, with a theoretically more recognized system of bachelors and masters degrees. What the outcome of this ongoing process will be for the competitiveness of German academic research, e.g., to reverse the brain drain of well educated young researchers, has to be seen. The second aspect is more concerned with the methods and materials used in microstructure technologies. Germany, similar to all other European countries, lost the microelectronics race, some time during the 1980s, with the effect being that practically only one large German microelectronics manufacturer (Infineon) exists. For this reason, much of the microfabrication research and development in academia as well as in industry was carried out in disciplines outside the classical silicon-dominated domains. One only has to think of the development of the LIGA (lithografie, galvanoformung, abformung = lithography, electroplating, molding) process,¹ in the late 1980s initially for the separation of uranium isotopes, or the early works on microreaction technology for the chemical industry, mostly based on metallic microstructures, which started in the early 1990s.² For microfluidics, this turns out to be a significant aspect. It can be observed that the commercialization of microfluidics-enabled applications is currently in full swing and many applications demand solutions which usually can be fulfilled with methods other than conventional MEMS technologies. So it is therefore not surprising, despite the fact that Germany is not necessarily well known for its entrepreneurial culture and abundance of venture capital investments, that we find many microfluidics service providers in Germany which manufacture devices in materials such as polymers (e.g., microfluidic ChipShop, ThinXXS, Boehringer Ingelheim microparts, Bartels Mikrotechnik) or glass (e.g., Little Things Factory, iX factory) which have been active in this field for many years. These academic and commercial activities are complemented by a specific research infrastructure in Germany comprising three large, mostly federally funded research organizations. Firstly, the Max-Planck Society, which is mostly active in basic science, secondly the Fraunhofer Society which is more oriented towards applied sciences (a fine example can be seen in this issue in the paper by Schumacher et al., DOI: 10.1039/C1LC20693A) and thirdly the Helmholtz Society which combines large-scale research facilities under one umbrella organization. This rich research infrastructure makes Germany an attractive place to perform work in lab-on-a-chip technologies, not only for the creation of knowledge and journal articles but also for the generation of sustainable industrial growth with associated job creation. It is therefore not surprising that MicroTAS, the largest conference in this field, makes its German debut in Freiburg in 2013. Hope to see you all there.

We hope you all enjoy reading the diverse range of papers in this issue of Lab on a Chip.

References

1. E. W. Becker, W. Ehrfeld, P. Hagmann, A. Maner and D. Münchmeyer, Fabrication of microstructures with high aspect ratios and great structural heights by synchrotron radiation lithography, galvanoforming, and plastic moulding (LIGA process), Microelectron. Eng., 1986, 1, 35–56.
2. Ed. W. Ehrfeld, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Microreaction Technology: IMRET I, Springer, Berlin, 1997.

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