The Centre organizes interdisciplinary workshops, lectures, and symposia encouraging critical dialogues between academia, students, and the public on problems related to scientific practice such as media hypes, political ideologies, irreproducible papers.
The Centre is named after German-American physiologist and experimental biologist Jacques Loeb (1859-1924), legendary experimentalist and seminal thinker in the history of biology. His passionate promotion of biology as an exact experimental science and his opposition to the vitalistic concepts prevalent around 1900 impacted greatly on the development of the life sciences. Loeb's interest in philosophical and political issues brought him into contact with major figures in science, philosophy, and history, including Svante Arrhenius, Albert Einstein, Ernst Mach, Leonor Michaelis, and George Sarton.
The Centre was founded in 2007 and has been directed since then by Ute Deichmann.
