Prof. Dr. Johanna Plendl already retired at the end of the last winter semester. She is a former director and professor of anatomy, histology and embryology at the Institute of Veterinary Anatomy, a specialist veterinarian in anatomy and pathology. Since 2009, Prof. Plendl has also been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Her research focuses on the formation and regression of blood vessels, known as angiogenesis and anti-angiogenesis, and their regulation.

We are delighted that Prof. Plendl has taken the time to look back on her career and share with us some of the important milestones, special events and decisions she has made, as well as some wonderful anecdotes.

Thank you very much and all the best for the future!

Friederike Grasse asked the questions.

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Prof. Plendl, a few months have passed since you left the School of Veterinary Medicine. How are you doing?

It's been almost half a year since I transitioned from working to retired, and I'm surprised at how well I've adjusted. I said goodbye with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I cried because I always considered my work at the department a great gift and now I miss the students and many colleagues. On the other hand, I laughed because I have always found changes in life to be enriching, even if it didn't feel that way at the beginning.

Is it what you had hoped and expected?

Since I was often warned about the loss of meaning that can come with retirement, I started thinking about it early on. I already knew that I would support my mother, who is now 88 years old. I haven't yet looked for a hobby or volunteer position. If I have enough free time, I will travel, as I did before.

What has changed for you?

A lot, because I have swapped the big city of Berlin for my home village in Bavaria. I find life in the countryside more manageable, I enjoy being close to nature, although the anonymity of the big city also has something to offer.

Do you have any special plans for the time after your active working life here at the department? And how close have you come to them already?

I travel a lot, including to places that are not generally considered dream destinations. One wish that has not yet been fulfilled is to travel to Papua New Guinea. I'm working on it.

Do you still remember your first day or days at Freie Universität Berlin? What stood out to you back then, whether positive or negative, and what do you still remember today?

My first day at work at Freie Universität was in July 2000. I particularly remember the very warm welcome from colleagues in the department, and within a short time there was cooperation in teaching and research. What I found very positive at the institute was that, unlike at some other universities, there was no strict distinction between anatomists and histologists, but rather everyone worked together very cooperatively in both disciplines.

What I remember negatively, however, is the shock I felt when I realized that during the breaks, the working group was divided into “Ossis” and “Wessis”. This was partly due to the fact that at the time there was no tea kitchen or similar room that could accommodate everyone. This has changed over time and with a larger common room.

I still remember an incident on my first day at work very well. I rode my bike into the institute parking lot of my predecessor, which he had shown me at a meeting. A man approached me and said very firmly: “Young lady, you can't park your bike here, this is the parking lot for the new anatomy professor's car!” “I'm the new professor and I don't have a car!” I replied... and that not only cleared up the misunderstanding, it was much more the beginning of a friendly relationship with the colleague in question. It turned out that he was very knowledgeable about bicycles and he repaired many a flat tire on my bike.

Looking back on your time at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Freie Universität Berlin, what were your personal highlights?

In the teaching area, it was the annual arrival of the new students and the adventurous first hours in the dissecting room with about 200 inexperienced but all the more enthusiastic first-year students armed with a sharp scalpel. The support of the highly competent taxidermists at the institute was literally vital here.

The personal contact with the students in my lectures and practical courses has always meant a lot to me. It gave me the opportunity to meet interesting people, originals, whom I will never forget, such as the student studying animation who, as a student assistant, mixed up our anatomy with her wonderful caricatures , or the student who worked in a Berlin club alongside her studies, also boxed and, in the preliminary medical examination, was able to answer the dreaded question about “cerebral nerve deficits” with breathtaking perfection.

What have you been particularly happy about, what are you proud of?

I was always particularly pleased about exciting findings in cell culture, which I could sometimes get so excited about that my colleagues thought something had happened. It was a similar story when we found out that our scientific manuscripts had been accepted for publication or that applications for third-party funding had been approved. I can't thank the institute's technical staff enough, who played a central role in this due to their excellent work.

And I was very pleased to receive a call to the VetSuisse Faculty in Zurich in 2006 and, just last year, to the Medical School Berlin.

I am proud of many of my former doctoral and post-doctoral students who have been very successful in their careers – whether in practice, clinic, pharmaceutical industry, as respected official veterinarians and several as professors.

What annoyed you more during that time, or held you back, irritated you, etc. – or to put it another way: What would you have liked to have been different?

I was held back and irritated by the sometimes absurd administration, which took up a lot of manpower and energy. At first I was very annoyed about this and when a permit for my Berlin laboratory, which I had received at my previous job, the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, within a few weeks, was still pending even after half a year, I hissed into the phone: “Now I understand why Bavaria is so much richer than Berlin, because they work there, but in Berlin they only administer.” The dry answer was “Then go back!” Sometimes I wished I had a capable “lab manager” like the ones I got to know in laboratories in the USA. However, the structures of the American working world cannot be compared with those in Germany and therefore the red tape here will continue to neigh loudly for a long time to come.

In 2000, you moved from Munich to Berlin – a big change? What did you particularly miss in Berlin and what do you appreciate about Berlin today, which you might now miss in Bavaria?

Moving from Munich to Berlin was of course sad at first, because I had spent almost 20 years there and missed important people in my life.

But Berlin made it easy for me, because – as a doctoral student once said – “in Berlin, you arrive and are allowed to participate”. I was amazed and touched by the affinity many Berliners have for Bavaria, because I was often assured how much people enjoy listening to my Bavarian dialect because it reminds them of their last vacation in Bavaria.

Now that I live in the countryside and far from Berlin, I miss its great museums and many international restaurants the most... and thanks to the rose-tinted glasses of memory, sometimes I even miss the grubby corners. When I'm overcome by homesickness for Berlin, I read a short story by Uli Hannemann (for example, from “Neulich in Neukölln: Notizen von der Talsohle des Lebens”).

You have been a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2009. This is very impressive, because election to the Leopoldina is known to be one of the highest scientific honors awarded by a German institution. How did this come about and what specific tasks and experiences did it bring for you?

Being accepted into the Leopoldina was a great honor for me and the department. Among other things, the Leopoldina offers the opportunity to submit statements and recommendations on (animal/medical) issues and to support scientists by providing expert opinions or suggestions for prizes. I was elected to the Leopoldina after being proposed by an academy member from the School of Veterinary Medicine, who then obtained the successive approval of colleagues from the “Section of Veterinary Medicine in Class III Medicine”. After that, other members of the Leopoldina and, finally, the presidium had to agree. In the course of the selection process, my CV and my scientific publications were reviewed. As far as I know, I was the first female veterinarian in the Leopoldina at the time; male members of my profession were already members. I therefore owe my election to the Leopoldina primarily to men, just as I have been supported by men in many ways throughout my career, for which I am grateful.

You have successfully worked on animal-friendly testing methods and alternative methods to animal testing in research in committees and research projects. How do you assess the importance of alternative methods in Veterinary Medicine in terms of teaching and research in general? Will this area become more important in the teaching and research of veterinary medicine in the future? What do you think are the limits of alternative methods?

Replacement methods have great potential in both teaching and research, and examinations and interventions should be practiced on phantoms in “skills labs” as much as possible before moving on to real animal patients or laboratory animals.

However, there are still not enough simulators available, and therefore teaching exercises on live animals are necessary. In human medicine, students can examine each other, but in veterinary medicine, just about any manipulation on an animal is considered an animal experiment. For many years, I taught the harmless ultrasound anatomy on trained dogs. During the ultrasound examination, two students were always assigned to scratch the dog and give it a “treat” at regular intervals. For legal reasons, this then had to be declared an animal experiment.

Animal testing is required by law for drug approval. I don't know of anyone who enjoys conducting animal testing, but it prevents people from being harmed in clinical trials. Therefore, it will continue to play a role in the future. I hope that virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality will help to further reduce animal testing.

Both at and outside Freie Universität, you have taken on many roles on academic committees and have led and coordinated (joint) projects. Which ones were particularly close to your heart and why?

An important concern of many of my projects was the establishment and standardization of three-dimensional in vitro models of angiogenesis in order to reduce or replace animal testing. In this respect, my work on the steering committee of the Berlin-Brandenburg research platform BB3R, with an integrated research training group on “Innovations in 3R research – genetic engineering, tissue engineering and bioinformatics”, was particularly important to me.

Another favorite project (with my former doctoral student Dr. Giuliano Corte, now a research associate at the Institute of Veterinary Anatomy in Zurich) was the “SimulRATor”, which aimed to create a new, anatomically realistic rat simulator using 3D printing technology, which could be used in special courses in animal experimentation. In this project, all available rat and mouse simulators were evaluated together with Prof. Christa Thöne-Reineke and her team for their suitability as a complementary method in line with the 3R principle.

Thanks to my expertise and our excellent technical assistants in transmission electron microscopy, we were able to participate in many interdisciplinary research projects, including in the field of human medicine. I found the search for certain cells (“pale cells”) in the uterus and adjacent organs, which may be crucial in the development of endometriosis, particularly exciting in collaboration with Prof. Sylvia Mechsner from the Endometriosis Center at the Charité.

And last but not least, the “women's projects” were also very important to me, namely the first-time establishment of a program to support pregnant women and mothers/parents studying veterinary medicine and the establishment of a mentoring program for the School of Veterinary Medicine, the latter together with Prof. Mondy Bahramsoltani.

You have spent several research periods abroad, including at the Bland-Sutton Institute, Middlesex Hospital, London, U.K.; Medical School, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa; Lung Institute, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. Which research period do you look back on most fondly and why?

From a professional point of view, I look back most fondly on my time in the USA. I spent two years there (and many more semester breaks after that) working as a DFG fellow with Prof. Robert Auerbach, an expert in angiogenesis, the development of blood vessels. At his large institute at the University of Wisconsin, which had almost endless third-party funding, scientists from all over the world conducted research, and sometimes they even slept in the laboratory if it was necessary for an experiment. My time there was exciting in a positive sense and broadened my horizons enormously.

On a more personal note, I have particularly fond memories of my stay in Australia 16 years ago because I met my partner Ken Richardson there. I was working on a scientific collaboration project with the Lung Institute of Western Australia in Perth, and as I always did when I traveled, I visited the local veterinary anatomy to make contacts and learn. Ken, a zoologist, veterinarian and expert in crocodilian and kangaroo anatomy, was a professor at Murdoch University there.

Assuming you were about to take your high school graduation exam, would you apply to study veterinary medicine again with the knowledge and experience you have today? Why or why not and what would you study instead?

Yes, I would definitely study Veterinary Medicine again – that was my plan A at the time, but I also had a plan B in case I didn't make the grade. I studied to become a cattle practitioner and, while I was doing my doctorate, I was already working enthusiastically for a specialist veterinarian for cattle. When I then received a job offer from my doctoral supervisor in his research group, my life took an unexpected turn. After that, I often found myself regretting my decision to leave large-animal practice during the uncertain phases of an academic career – as there were, for example, in the renewal of university employment contracts. I always found work in research and teaching to be meaningful and did it with passion and joy, voluntarily and generously exceeding the regular working hours, including on weekends.

What advice would you give to today's first-year students?

Students should be aware that by studying Veterinary Medicine, they can pursue an exceptionally diverse and interesting career.

Veterinary surgeons treat a wide range of species, and this diversity requires broader thinking than a focus on just one species, as in human medicine. Veterinarians not only know and understand the species-specific characteristics that make, for example, a hamster, a dog, a horse, an elephant, a chicken, a turtle or a goldfish, but good veterinarians must also have the necessary knowledge for “cross-species thinking”. This means knowing that and why, for example, certain plants that a sheep can tolerate make a horse sick or why drugs that help a person can severely harm dogs.

The program opens up a wide range of career opportunities and fields of work for us veterinarians: in addition to curative practice and clinics, we can, for example, take responsibility for human health in the field of veterinary public health, develop new strategies against animal and human diseases as scientists in research projects, or carry out risk analyses in the approval of drugs in the pharmaceutical industry.

This privilege of being able to choose from a wide range of career opportunities is reflected in the difficulty of the course. It is very labor-intensive and exhausting, but it can be done. Failing exams is not the end of the world – don't be afraid to talk to your lecturers about it.

Assuming you were to return to your institute/department for a brief visit in ten years' time, what would you like to see have developed particularly well by then?

The profession of veterinarian is currently undergoing massive changes due to the integration of AI-based technologies into the daily work of practically all specialties.

At the institute, my research group was already working with AI to quantify angiogenesis in a project led by Prof. Sabine Käßmeyer (former doctoral student and research assistant, now head of the Institute of Veterinary Anatomy in Bern). It saves time and effort – provided that the user is familiar with the method and has the necessary expertise to ensure quality, because the results are affected by artefacts, among other things.

I would hope that in 10 years and beyond, the institute and the department will continue to produce veterinarians and experts, particularly in the hard sciences, who will be able to critically assess AI data and diagnose erroneous results, misinterpretations and fake facts produced by AI.

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At the end of this interview, I would like to send warm greetings to all colleagues and students who still remember me. Thank you, it was so nice working with you!