Laureate Heineken Prizes

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2016 to Jennifer Doudna, Professor of Biomedical Sciences at the University of California in Berkeley (United States).

Pioneering research laying the foundations for revolutions in modern biochemistry 
Jennifer Doudna received the Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics for her pioneering research into the structure and functioning of RNA molecules and RNA protein complexes.
From the beginning of her career, Jennifer Doudna knew that knowledge of the structure of RNA molecules was essential in order to understand their catalytic effect. She therefore started analysing crystal structures of RNA molecules right at the outset of her studies.
At first, these were relatively simple molecules. However, in the mid-1990s, she made a daring but successful attempt to crystallise and analyse a much larger RNA molecule: the Tetrahymena ribozyme P4-P6 domain. For the first time, researchers learnt how a long, complex RNA strand folds itself into functional bends so as to interact with surrounding molecules.
Doudna is still a leading researcher in the rapidly expanding research field dealing with the functioning of RNA molecules and RNA protein complexes. Her work created the foundations for exciting developments at the forefront of biochemistry: RNA interference and CRISPR, a bacterial system of defence against invading DNA that can now be used to edit the DNA code of living organisms with the greatest possible precision.

Researcher
Jennifer Doudna was born in 1964 in Hawaii (US). She studied at Pomona College in Claremont, California, but after gaining a bachelor degree in chemistry, she relocated to Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts). Under the supervision of Jack Szostak (who was later to win both the Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics (2008) and a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2009)), she was awarded a doctorate in 1989 for research into ribosomes, DNA-creating structures at the centre of a cell.
In that same year, Doudna continued her research at the University of Colorado (in Boulder) together with Thomas Cech, who later also won both the Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics (1988) and a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1989). In 1994, she was appointed assistant professor at Yale University. Three years later, she became an investigator at the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
In 2002, Doudna was appointed Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California in Berkeley, where she still occupies a chair.
Jennifer Doudna is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences. She has been awarded many prizes, including the Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research in 2014, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2015 and in 2016 the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award and the Canada Gairdner International Award.
In 2020, Jennifer Doudna has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Emmanuelle Charpentier.

Article
— Interview with Jennifer Doudna in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

Dutch visual artist Yvonne Dröge Wendel has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2016. The international jury has praised Wendel’s work for its originality, inventiveness and vitality.

Art
The drive behind her work is tangible and visible in her playful, philosophical studies of how objects influence human behaviour. One notable example is the artwork Black Ball, a large felted ball measuring 3.5 metres in diameter, that the public moves down streets and alleyways and through gates and doorways. People respond with visible enjoyment to the ball and interact spontaneously with it. In her PhD research project, she is examining the relational and performative abilities of things, a theme that touches on present-day questions about our relationship to the world around us. By awarding the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art to Yvonne Dröge Wendel, the jury is emphasising the potential of art to change our perception and experience of the world.

Artist
Yvonne Dröge Wendel (born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1961) lives and works in Amsterdam. She trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie  in Amsterdam and was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1993-1994) and Delfina Studios in London (2002-2003). She is currently working on a PhD artistic research project at the University of Twente. She is also head of the department of fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She publishes art books, features frequently in solo and group exhibitions, and engages on a regular basis with the public in public spaces. In 1994 she won the second Prix de Rome to be awarded in the fine arts and theatre.

More information
— http://www.yvonnedrogewendel.nl/

Article
— Interview with Yvonne Dröge Wendel in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Works of art

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine 2016 to Steve Jackson, Professor of Biology at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

DNA repair: the Achilles’ heel of cancer cells
Steve Jackson received the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine for his fundamental research into DNA repair in human cells and for the successful application of knowledge of that process in the development of new cancer drugs.
DNA molecules in our cells are continuously being damaged. Healthy cells can signal such damage and trigger various repair mechanisms, such as a mechanism that reconnects broken DNA strands.
Jackson investigated how cells know what type of repair is needed and what signal is given to start the correct repair process. Moreover, he successfully applied that knowledge in medical research.
In cancer cells, one or more DNA repair methods are often defective. Consequently, they cannot be properly controlled. Jackson explores mechanisms of DNA repair and looks for new drugs that kill cancer cells by breaking down their recovery capacity even further. He exploits a concept called ‘synthetic lethality’. It is now clear that this concept has potential. In 2014, a new drug became available to treat a certain type of ovarian cancer. Clinical application trials for other cancer types are in progress.

Researcher
Steve Jackson was born in 1962 in Nottingham (United Kingdom). In 1983, he gained a bachelor degree in biochemistry at the University of Leeds. In 1987, he was awarded a PhD for molecular biology research at the University of Edinburgh, after which he moved to Berkeley, California (United States).
Jackson returned to the United Kingdom after four years. In Cambridge, he took up a position at the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK Institute, which is part of the University of Cambridge. In 2004, the institute was renamed ‘The Gurdon Institute’. He has also been an Associate Faculty with the Sanger Institute in Hinxton near Cambridge since 2012.
Jackson’s two hundred research articles have been referred to on more than thirty thousand occasions.
In addition to being a researcher, Jackson is also an entrepreneur. In 1997, he set up KuDOS Pharmaceuticals to apply his DNA repair knowledge to new cancer drugs. In 2011, together with private investors, Jackson set up a second company, MISSION Therapeutics, to apply his knowledge to more cancer drugs.

More information
— Website The Gurdon Institute and Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge

Article
— Interview with Stephen Jackson in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2016 to Professor Judith Herrin, Emeritus Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s College London (UK).

A leading role in history for the Byzantine Empire
Judith Herrin received the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History for her pioneering research into Medieval cultures in Mediterranean civilisations and for establishing the crucial significance of the Byzantine Empire in history.
Herrin has a huge international reputation as a researcher and as an author of popular books on history. Her work is characterised by four main themes:

• The first consists of a detailed comparison of eastern and western attitudes towards religious images in the early Middle Ages. Her book The Formation of Christendom, which was first published in 1987, has become a standard reference work.
• The second theme is the political, economic and social history of Byzantium: the Medieval Roman Empire (330–1453) of which Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) was the capital. Herrin’s book Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empirewhich was published in 2007 has also become a standard work that has already appeared in twelve languages.
• A third theme consists of archaeological field research into traces from the Byzantine period in Greece, Cyprus and Istanbul.
• In the fourth theme, she uses her own methods to examine the role of ordinary women in Medieval society.

The jury praises Herrin’s ability to convert archive studies and field research into a broad vision that is rich in detail. Her work paved the way for a non-theological view of the influence of Christendom on Medieval society. Thanks to Herrin, the place of the Byzantine Empire in history is now assessed at its true value and thanks to her tenacity, the many varied contributions made by women to Byzantine society are now appreciated.

Researcher
Judith Herrin was born in 1942 in the United Kingdom. She gained a bachelor degree at Newnham College in Cambridge (UK) and was awarded a PhD in 1972 at the University of Birmingham (UK).
As a committed European avant la lettre, she received tuition at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, the École pratique des hautes études in Paris and the Institut für Byzantinistik und Neugriechische Philologie in Munich.
During her career, she was appointed to many positions and received frequent fellowships and grants in Europe and in the US. Between 1991 and 1995, she was the Stanley J. Seeger Professor of Byzantine History at Princeton University (US). From 1995 to 2001, as Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, she headed the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London.
Herrin has received various honours for her work, including the Médaille d’honneur from the Collège de France and the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour from Greece.

Article
— Interview with Judith Herrin in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences 2016 to Georgina Mace, Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University College London (United Kingdom).

Species or ecosystem? Science as a basis for priorities in nature conservation
Georgina Mace received the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences for developing scientific criteria for the world’s most comprehensive list of threatened species and for establishing priorities for nature conservation. She made a major contribution to the notion that healthy ecosystems and biodiversity are natural capital that render important services to humans, which is now a central concept in the nature management debate.
Since the early 1990s, Mace has been researching the complicated relationships between the extinction or survival of flora and fauna species and the condition of the ecosystems in which those species live.

• What effect does the extinction of a species have on the ecosystem?
• How does a change to the habitat affect the survival chances of individual species?
• What are the priorities in nature management?

These are issues that prompt a great deal of debate, also because economic factors play a major role.
Mace responds to these arguments not with new opinions, but rather with the power of logic and objective scientific methods.
A system of scientific criteria developed by Mace for ecosystems and species at risk was adopted in 2000 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as the basis for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The system has now been applied to more than seventy thousand species. Many countries and regions use the system to measure the seriousness of ecological changes as a basis to draw up policy priorities.
Consequently, Mace’s work has become a model of research that is effectively transformed into objectively substantiated policy advice. It has established her huge international reputation as a leading nature conservation researcher.

Researcher
Georgina Mace was born in London (UK) in 1953. In 1976, she gained her bachelor degree in zoology at the University of Liverpool. Three years later, she was awarded a PhD at the University of Sussex for a study of the evolutionary ecology of small mammals.
Mace subsequently researched the impact of inbreeding on animal populations in zoos at the Smithsonian Institution in the US. In 2000, she became scientific director of the Institute of Zoology in London. In 2006, she was appointed director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College London.
Since 2012, she has been Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems and director of the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research at University College London.
Mace has received various awards for her work. In 2002, she was admitted to the Royal Society in the UK and in 2007 she received the International Cosmos Prize in Japan. In 2007, she was also appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her contributions to environmental sciences and in 2016 she became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to science in general.
Georgina Mace passed away on 19 September 2020.

Article
— Interview with Georgina Mace in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2016 to Elizabeth Spelke, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University in Cambridge (United States).

The unexpected capacities of an infant’s brain
Elizabeth Spelke received the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science for her pioneering research into the cognitive development of infants.
Her experiments and concepts have drastically altered our understanding of the mind. She demonstrated which parts of the human cognition are already naturally present at birth, which are learnt and when that takes place.
Spelke analysed what, how and when young children learn by studying how they gaze at the world. How do they distinguish social beings from inanimate objects? What is their understanding of numbers and quantities? How do they deal with place and time?
She discovered that the cognitive capacity of young children is larger than had long been assumed. She discovered signs that children have a universal system to process spatial information from a very early age. This system is similar to the one used by laboratory animals such as rats to get their bearings.
She studied how young children select social partners with whom they interact, cooperate and share. As a result, we have learnt more about fundamental processes such as social exclusion and interpersonal conflict.
An important concept in Spelke’s work is ‘core knowledge’: modules enclosed within the brain of every infant that help to recognise objects, as well as to navigate, count and communicate. Spelke argued that the core knowledge of humans is similar to that of animals, but that humans can develop much further because language enables children to link the separate knowledge modules.
This theory explains that although human cognition may be unique, it nevertheless fits within a broad evolutionary perspective. It has implications not only for upbringing, education and psychology, but also for philosophy, anthropology and artificial intelligence, et cetera.

Researcher
Elizabeth Spelke was born in 1949 in the United States. She gained her bachelor degree in social relations at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). She studied at Yale University in New Haven (Connecticut) before being awarded a PhD in psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca (New York).
After working for ten years at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, she returned to Cornell in 1986 as Professor of Psychology. In 1996 she returned to Cambridge, first to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, from 2001, to Harvard University. She has also held various guest positions in Paris and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (Maryland).
Spelke is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has received many distinctions and prizes including the Distinguished Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the William James Award of the American Psychological Society, the Jean Nicod Prize of the École Normale Supérieure, the Kurt Koffka Medal of the University of Giessen (Germany) and the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.

More information
— Elizabeth Spelke, Laboratory for Development Studies, Harvard University

Article
— Interview with Elizabeth Spelke in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has awarded the Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2014 to Christopher Dobson, John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).
Professor Dobson received the prize for uncovering the manner in which proteins in the human body sometimes misfold themselves and how that process may lead to age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.

Researcher
Christopher M. Dobson was born in the United Kingdom on 8 October 1949. He studied at the University of Oxford and in 1976 received his PhD there. One year later he left Oxford for the USA to do research at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In 1980 Dobson returned to Oxford, where he became Professor of Chemistry in 1996. Two years later he was appointed Director of the Oxford Centre for Molecular Sciences. In 2001, Dobson once again left Oxford for Cambridge, only this time it was Cambridge in the UK. He has served as the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology at the University of Cambridge ever since.
Dobson has authored or co-authored over 650 published research and review papers, more than 30 of which were published in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. In addition to his duties as a highly productive and influential researcher, Dobson has served as Master of Cambridge’s age-old St John’s College since 2007.
Dobson has received numerous awards and decorations. In 2009 he received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in London. He is a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has earned honorary doctorates from five universities in Belgium, Sweden, Italy and the United Kingdom.
Dobson passed away in September 2019.

Research
Chris Dobson has been studying the way in which biological molecules behave for many years, both in laboratories and test tubes and in the real world of the human body. His work has helped show how molecular building blocks assemble themselves into chains, and how these chains fold into complex structures.
Elaborately folded proteins, made up of hundreds of amino acids, together make up the smart machinery of every living cell. Sometimes, however, things end up less well: a misfolded protein may snag other proteins, sticking to them in clumps that can do serious damage to vital organs.
With his group at the University of Cambridge, Dobson has made great strides in unravelling how, as we grow older, such clumps may begin to appear more often. Small at first, they may spread to other organs. Ultimately, as more normal proteins get tangled up, the clump gets stuck in some organ’s tissue. There it may lead, directly or indirectly, to such serious ailments as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease or type-2 diabetes.
Years ago, researchers saw ‘amyloid plaques’ in brain tissue as a specific and unique cause of Alzheimer’s. Thanks in part to Dobson, many people now recognise that these plaques are but one example of misfolded proteins causing problems. In fact, Dobson suggests that most human proteins are capable of misfolding and that when we get older, they may affect many of our organs, resulting in numerous types of disease.
Dobson’s strength is that he has consistently approached complex problems such as protein folding through multiple disciplines. He has applied a range of techniques, including NMR, spectroscopy, molecular biology and computer modelling. With his original, creative and innovative work, he has managed to bridge the gap between our knowledge of molecular behaviour in test tubes and our knowledge of the ‘real world’ of living cells.
Dobson’s work is not finished. He has widened his research interests to include the self-assembly of molecules in wholly new fields such as materials science and nanotechnology.

More information
— Personal page on website University of Cambridge

Article
— Interview with Christopher Dobson in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

Wendelien van Oldenborgh, a visual artist who lives and works in Rotterdam, has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2014.
According to the jury, Van Oldenborgh occupies a unique place in the Dutch artistic landscape because of the way in which she addresses modern-day social issues in exceptional, authoritative and multi-layered works. Van Oldenborgh has an impressive track record, having exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial (2010), the Istanbul Biennial (2009) and other internationally renowned art fairs.

Art
Van Oldenborgh’s work accesses parts of our reality that remain in the background in other areas of public life. We see a world that is often hidden from view on television and in the papers. A somewhat older example is Sound Track Stage, part of the series A Certain Brazilianness (2006). Here, she set up the representatives of two subcultures, “Gabber” and “Hip Hop”, for a musical and verbal confrontation. The confrontation unfolded at Rotterdam’s Boijmans van Beuningen Museum and was shot professionally and screened as it took place. Both during the public recording session and in the film, she avoided a black-and-white depiction of these subcultures but showed them to be complex systems in which similarities overlap subtly with differences.
Van Oldenborgh has a unique ability to build a dialogue between a precisely selected social or historical theme, a space, and a film or photograph. This is very clear in her more recent work, for example Après la reprise, la prise (2009), in which she focuses on two employees of an old French jeans factory who are reinventing themselves as actors. The two women tell their life story to a group of vocational school students who are about to graduate. The work consists of slides and audio clips documenting their encounter and projected in a fit-for-purpose space. The two generations of workers brought together in sound and image raise questions about industrial and demographic shifts. Van Oldenborgh compares and contrasts the ethnically mixed group of pupils with the older, white employees, whose work in the theatre has unexpectedly landed them in the “creative” industry. Their meeting unfolds into an interaction in which images and sound are not there to illustrate a story but to enter into dialogue with each other. Images and sound assume an importance beyond the story. The challenge for the viewer is not only to comprehend the world (as narrative), but – by looking – to understand a familiar story in a new way. It is precisely this subtlety that reveals Van Oldenborgh’s unique artistry.

Artist
Wendelien van Oldenborgh (born in 1962) studied at Goldsmiths College, London. Before settling in Rotterdam, she lived and worked in Germany and Belgium. In addition to her artistic work, she teaches various Master’s degree courses, including at the Dutch Art Institute / ArtEZ (Master of Fine Arts) and the Royal Academy of Art (Artistic Research Master’s programme). She previously received the Hendrik Chabot Prize for Fine Arts (2011) and the Marian McMahon Award (2010).

More information
— Personal page at website Dutch Art Institute

Article
— Interview with Wendelien van Oldenborgh in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

Works of art

Professor Alitalo received the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine 2014 for his pioneering research on how and when lymph and blood vessels grow, and how that knowledge could help us find interventions to treat cancer and other diseases.

Researcher
Prof. Kari Alitalo was born in Kuopio (Finland) in 1952. As a young man, his ambition to advance medical practice made him decide against studying maths. He ended up studying medicine at the University of Helsinki, the same institution in which he obtained his Ph.D. in 1980.
After spending about five years in the west coast of the U.S., where he worked with famous scientists like Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus, he returned to Helsinki in 1986.
In 1993, Alitalo was named Academy Professor of Molecular Biology of Cancer by the University of Helsinki.
Since 2013, Alitalo has been Director of the Wihuri Research Institute, a private institute founded in 1944 to study vascular biology and diseases of vascular systems. He also leads a Centre of Excellence in translational cancer research at the University of Helsinki.
Alitalo ranks among the most-cited cancer and cell biology researchers in Europe. With more than 550 published papers to his name, he has been cited more than 55,000 times.
He is member of the Academy of Europe and the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, and foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded many prestigious prizes, including the Prix Leopold Griffuel (France), the Louis-Jeantet Prize for medicine (Switzerland) and the InBev-Baillet Latour Health Prize (Belgium).
The blood and lymphatic vascular systems are essential for circulating fluid, sources of energy, oxygen, antibodies and immune cells around the human body.
For 18 years, Professor Kari Alitalo has been at the forefront of research on how this crucial transport system is constructed and maintained in the healthy body and how it is affected by disease. He has also been among the leaders in using this new knowledge to find better treatments for cancer and vascular disease.
Alitalo is best known for his discovery of biomolecular mechanisms that promote and regulate the growth of lymphatic and blood vessels.
The importance of lymphatic vessels for fluid regulation and the immune system has been known for more than a century. Most of that time however, it was completely unclear how vessels knew where to grow, when or how medicines could be used to influence their behaviour. Such knowledge is vital for developing treatments for diseases of the vascular system itself, such as lymphoedema that results in abnormal accumulations of fluid in the body. It could also help greatly in tackling cancer, since tumour cells often use lymphatic vessels to travel to other organs.
Alitalo and his co-workers were the first to discover a molecular ‘switch’ that, if appropriately stimulated, induced epithelial tissue in skin to transform into lymphatic vessels. He subsequently discovered the growth factor that is key to this trigger. Since then four more switches and four more growth factors have been identified, and Alitalo was involved in three of those discoveries.
Thanks to Alitalo, this basic knowledge is currently being used very actively in the search for new medicines. Three molecular compounds are now in the early stages of implementation as drugs: one is to treat lymphoedema, another targets blood vessels in tumours that might inhibit their growth, and yet another could slow down cancer metastasis by blocking new growth of lymphatic vessels.
Taken together, Alitalo’s pioneering work has contributed impressively to what we now know about how our body builds and controls its vascular systems, and how one day we may be able to use that knowledge in treating many devastating diseases.

More information
— Personal page on website University of Helsinki

Article
— Interview with Kari Alitalo in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2014 to Aleida Assmann, Professor of English Literature at the University of Konstanz (Germany).
Professor Assmann received the prize for her ground-breaking contribution to the study of the ‘cultural memory’ of nations and other types of human communities.

Researcher
Aleida Assmann was born in Bethel, near Bielefeld (Germany), on 22 March 1947. She studied English and Egyptology at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen and obtained her PhD in both disciplines in 1977. In 1993, Assmann became professor of Anglistik en Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaften at the University of Konstanz (Germany). She has travelled abroad frequently for guest professorships, for example at Rice University (Houston), Princeton, Yale and the University of Chicago in the United States, and the University of Vienna in Austria.
She has published hundreds of essays, books and collections of articles on English literature, cultural memory and ‘remembrance’. She is member of the Academies of Science in Brandenburg, Göttingen and Austria, and received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo in 2008.
In 2009, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Max Planck Society presented Assmann with a Max Planck Research Award (€ 750,000). In 2011, she received the Ernst Robert Curtius Prize for essays from the University of Bonn Society.

Research
Each of us has recollections of the past. How we deal with the present depends on which events we remembered and which ones we forgot. The same is true for groups of people, for communities, and for entire nations: some events are stored in their ‘collective memory’, while others fade over time.
Aleida Assmann is a pioneer in what has become a distinct discipline: the study of one particular kind of collective memory, which she has named ‘cultural memory’. It is the study of how societies deal with their past through cultural expression, for example the news media, literature, the visual arts, music, buildings and monuments, and remembrance days. Some memories are passed on culturally to new generations; others are mostly ignored and thus ‘forgotten’.
Together with Jan Assmann, her husband, Aleida Assmann has helped establish a successful discipline, an ‘anthropology of remembrance’ that connects literary studies with historical science, anthropology, psychology, theology, and neuroscience. Their conceptual framework has been accepted and adopted worldwide.
Assmann recognised, for example, how Germany’s ‘cultural memory’ after the Second World War was dominated by feelings of guilt about Nazism and the Holocaust. In other countries and times, art and culture have typically allowed space for more positive self-reflections.
Assmann’s work raises interesting questions about how cultural memory can be modified for political or moral purposes. She has often participated in public debates on how societies can best deal with historical disgrace – neither by covering it up nor by getting stuck in guilt.
In Germany, she stressed the importance of using the annual national commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz both to ensure that Germans remember the Holocaust and to highlight how human rights are now part of the country’s political and moral foundation.
For the same reason, Assmann has joined the campaign to make 8 May a remembrance day commemorating World War II and the Holocaust all across Europe, in part to unite Europeans in a shared vision of a peaceful future.

Article
— Interview with Aleida Assmann in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video