A life in chemistry — and cinema

Read Chemists unite! InChI is now built for collaboration — and scale

Meanwhile, Gerd has also enjoyed a concurrent career in cinema as a programmer, festival organizer, and founder of a streaming documentary film platform in 2000 — seven years before Netflix decided to pivot away from renting DVDs.

When asked how he connects these two seemingly disparate worlds of cinema and Cheminformatics, Gerd smiled:

The similarities may not be immediately apparent, but I can certainly have a long conversation about this. However, at the core of both, you need experience in funding, organization, communication and storytelling to work successfully with customers.

With that said, we decided to have that longer conversation.

What catalyzed first — the passion for cinema or the passion for chemistry?

Chemistry. I was fascinated by theoretical chemistry. But at that time, to become a theoretical chemist, you needed to cover a lot of very practical work in organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry and whatever – basically, all the parts I was not very interested in. So after two years, I decided to make a radical change. I took philosophy. I took information science. And finally, I did my PhD in theoretical chemistry, and my dream of working with computers came true. But it did take me 15 years.

At that time, some accidental incidents led me to the cinema. I met a few people connected with a communal cinema. They needed help organizing stuff, and from them I learned a lot about the theory and history of film. I also learned how to run a projector and various business and commercial aspects behind running a cinema, along with distribution and all the rest. It also included the production of a Super-8 movie called The Mission opens in new tab/window that was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984. It was a lot of fun and compensation for all the boring chemistry I had to do.

Later, some of us from this group went on to run a children’s film festival. The International Children’s Film Festival in the Ruhr District developed into one of the top three festivals of its kind in Germany in the early 1990s. Ultimately, we stopped doing the festival in 1995 because we all had children. I used to say, “Instead of having 11,000 kids in a week, we now just have two every day.”

I’m guessing the streaming documentary service was your next significant evolution as a film person. Were you able to apply your IT knowledge from chemistry here? Was there finally more overlap?

I suppose my technical knowledge offered this opportunity. I was at a meeting of a German documentary filmmaking community, and Cay Wesnigk opens in new tab/window, a documentary producer, presented the idea of a documentary streaming company controlled by the community of documentary filmmakers themselves. I found this a nice idea and asked him if he had already figured out how to deal with all the different character sets from foreign productions in the database — like Eastern European languages or Icelandic or whatever.

And that’s a very InChI-related question! How do you make something universal? How do you make something accessible to all interested parties? So, what happened?

Well, since he had never thought about it to that level, he invited me to join the project. And over the next three years, a group of us built up this idea of media-on-demand. But it was still only 2001 when we formally opened the company as onlinefilm AG opens in new tab/window, and it was just not possible with how the internet was back then — it would take all this time just to upload the sound of drums in the soundtrack! And the people with the capabilities — the nerds — were not interested in the documentaries we wanted to share. But we survived the dot-com bubble because we invested very carefully estimating that the technical infrastructure would be ready five years later. And indeed, at the end of 2005, the right audience suddenly came.

Keep in mind that Netflix changed to video-on-demand streaming in 2007 — they really choose the right commercial point to enter. But since we were already so far ahead, no one wanted to invest in us, so we went under when we wanted to replace the Flash Player in 2020. We also made other mistakes, but maybe those are stories for another time.

Technologies take over, and you must go with the times or perish. My last film venture was running an open-air cinema from 2012 to 2014. We had to stop because everything became digitized: Investing €18,000 for 24 screenings per year just doesn’t make financial sense.

Again, like InChI. To survive, InChI had to go open-source and enter the GitHub ecosystem. Were there actual points when your two worlds overlapped?

Well, sometimes in an anecdotal way. I was in LA for a cheminformatics conference and saw Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Blvd. When I entered the theater, I made a time jump of 50 years and saw the same place as it looked in the late 1960s. That left an overwhelming impression.

But there are many concrete ways they overlap. I ended up being part of that video-on-demand company because of technical questions I raised, which obviously come out of my work in cheminformatics. The involved contracts in both are quite similar in terms of IP protection: A license agreement with a software company reads similarly to a movie distribution contract.

Also, in terms of improvisation, when you run a cinema, sometimes things break down and you have to think on your feet to find a solution. In fact, I would say that to do my IT job, I only needed 30% of what I got from my PhD and 70% from my experiences in the media business.

How about in terms of storytelling?

When you give a demonstration, you want to sell some software — because your job basically depends on it. So you want to offer a short and compelling story. And quite interestingly, I discovered Hollywood plot point storytelling opens in new tab/window: Each story point builds on the next, and all focus on realizing the ending — the resolution. Plus, Hollywood storytelling is very universal. It has been heard and accepted by most people around the world.

What are the big plot points when it comes to InChI?

That there's only one InChI per compound — and that it’s free, universal and, in theory, unlimited. That’s why it’s called an identifier: It can be identified by all the people who are interested in it. And that’s amazing if you consider with the first database, the number of structures we are coming up with is 10 to the power of 12.

If there were a documentary made about InChI, who should direct it?

I would go in a particular German direction, but that’s me. Documentaries are still pretty culturally related. I would recommend, though he is dead, Klaus Wildenhahn opens in new tab/window. He had a fantastic position: He worked for a northern German TV station called NDR, and he only had to make one full documentary per year. He was an excellent observer, and only in the worst cases did he start asking questions. He did a wonderful documentary about the choreographer Pina Bausch opens in new tab/window. Another German director, Wim Wenders opens in new tab/window, also made one opens in new tab/window about her that was also very observational. So I would like to see a documentary that observes people working with InChI.

There is a TV children’s show in Germany called Die Sendung mit der Maus opens in new tab/window featuring this mouse. It has these very short documentaries explaining how, for instance, you color ice cream or get those holes in Swiss cheese. And every Sunday, they show two or three of these. So I’d like to see InChI movies similar to these explaining each potential use case in a mini-doc. I’ve actually been thinking about this lately since AI is now making it much easier and faster to animate movies.

If the InChI story became a Hollywood movie, who would play you?

Well, InChI already has a long history. I’m just one of the rescue guys who came at the end. So maybe someone from Baywatch rescuing people from the sea? [Laughter.]

If this interview were a movie, what would be the big feel-good message you want to send everyone home with?

Follow your own creativity. AI and other new techniques are only making this more difficult, so you need to be vigilant. You really need to do this to develop your own life.