Peter Gruss (born 28 June 1949) is a German developmental biologist, president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, and the former president of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (having been elected for the term from 2002 to 2008 and reelected for 2008–2014). Gruss's research has generally covered the topic of control mechanisms in the development of mammals, especially in the development of the nervous system. He has been able to produce insulin using stem cells. Biography Gruss grew up in the town of Alsfeld in the German state of Hesse. After gaining his university-entrance qualification (Abitur), he embarked on a degree in biology at Darmstadt University of Technology in 1968, graduating from the Institute of Microbiology in 1973. From 1974 to 1977, Peter Gruss worked on his Ph.D. on the subject of a tumor virus at the Institute for Virus Research at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. He then spent a year as an assistant at the German Cancer Research Center. In 1978, he went to the US as a post doc in receipt of a fellowship grant to continue studying tumor viruses at the Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda/Maryland. From 1982 to 1986, Gruss was a professor at the University of Heidelberg's Institute of Microbiology. He was on the board of directors of the university's molecular biology institute, the ZMBH, from 1983. During this time, he organised several international molecular biology symposia. In 1986, Gruss was appointed a scientific member and director of the Department of Molecular Cell Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. He is honorary professor at University of Göttingen. He is a member of the board at Deutsche Venture Capital, and chairman of DeveloGen. In early 2015, Gruss has begun to develop the "Siemens Technology & Innovation Council" (STIC), which is an advisory board intended discuss technologies and innovations that will play a significant role for Siemens over the next ten years and beyond. Gruss chairs the council and decides on its orientation. Scientific focus Gruss's work focused on gene regulation processes. He was particularly interested in the genetic and cellular-biological building blocks that switch genetic programmes on and off in tumour viruses and in the course of embryonic development. In experiments on mice, he successfully identified significant controlling genes (known as Pax genes) which regulate the development of various organs. A study