official scientific research organization of Germany. It is headquartered in Munich. It was founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft), but its name was changed in 1948 to honour the great German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947), the originator of the quantum theory. The society is funded by the government and does research in areas of particular scientific importance and in highly specialized or interdisciplinary fields. Studies in such fields often require specialized facilities as well as funds and staff that cannot be supplied by the universities alone, and so the society brings together the necessary ingredients for productive, long-term research. The society supports more than 35 research institutes throughout Germany, each of which is devoted to a separate field or group of fields covering the medical and biological sciences, chemistry, physics, and technology. There are Max Planck institutes devoted to such disciplines as molecular genetics, biochemistry, plasma physics, and radio astronomy.