When the premises of the American Civil War forced the textile mills of Mississippi to a virtual stop, and the Russian Empire started seeking new cotton suppliers for its huge domestic market, Ludwig Knoop had a brilliant idea.

Visionary, high-risk, long-term and breaking down traditional boundaries. These are just some of the key ingredients in breakthrough technologies being targeted by FET researchers across Europe.

The so-called hygiene hypothesis claims young children need to get in contact with a number of relatively benign pathogens to develop a robust immune system .

Are allergies and so-called autoimmune diseases, like type 1 diabetes, likely to be caused by a lack of exposure to relatively benign pathogens in early childhood? This theory is referred to as the hygiene hypothesis.

Andre Konstantin Geim is the only person who ever received both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel . He was born in 1958 in Russia, and is a Dutch-British physicist with German, Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian roots.