 In the 1970s Gerd Koch and Klaus Helfrich, who subsequently became the Director of the Berlin Museum, attempted to get funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)) for an inter-discipline project to carry out field work in the Papua Province of New Guinea belonging to Indonesia, near the border with Papua New Guinea, which Europeans has not visited, and which in the 1970s had become a focus for Christian evangelists.While the intended inter-discipline project did not proceed the project resulted in a major exhibition at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin entitled "Steinzeit Heute" (Stone Age Today), which opened in 1979.For more than two decades he was the Deputy Director of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin.