Mainz is currently upside down anyway, and now the carnival is also taking place.

On this day the foolish constitution is read out.

Men in tiger costumes run through the Mainz morning mist, women wear large, colorful masks.

Michael Ebling is about to throw himself under them.

But the tall mayor of Mainz is still sitting in his office high above the city.

Usually Ebling is not at a loss for a joke.

But today, in the midst of all the madness, he is very reserved and calm.

Of course he's happy, says Ebling.

But success also comes with responsibility.

Julian Staib

Political correspondent for Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland based in Wiesbaden.

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Because suddenly his city is very rich.

Mainz, long in debt, is sitting on a bubbling source of money.

It's a little like the lottery.

Even if everyone in Mainz is now saying that happiness is pretty much self-deserved.

Ebling and the responsible head of finance announced the week a budget increase of probably more than one billion euros for this year.

In the coming year, the surplus is expected to be around half a billion.

Almost all of the money goes back to the vaccine manufacturer Biontech.

A miracle in Mainz.

The city now wants to hold onto that, or, best of all, multiply it.

But can miracles be repeated?

At the gold mine, of all things

Biontech is headquartered in the Upper Town of Mainz. The address is at the gold mine, of all things. But for a long time the company was anything but a gold mine. It swallowed up millions, lined up one minus after the other. And so far it has not achieved its actual goal of revolutionizing cancer research. Not a single drug has come onto the market to date. But then came the pandemic - and Biontech quickly developed a groundbreaking vaccine. The company made a pre-tax profit of 10.3 billion euros from January to September this year alone - with sales of 13.4 billion. The trade tax in Mainz has increased more than fivefold thanks to Biontech.

If you look for explanations for what is happening in the city, you keep hearing: The right people were there.

There was money.

Of course, the two were also related.

In addition, the decision-makers at the university and in politics did not do everything wrong.

Rows of numbers flicker across the screen on the ground floor of the Institute for Molecular Biology (IMB) on the university campus.

Amit Fulzele stands in front of it, research assistant at the IMB.

Fulzele grew up in India, studied and worked in France and the USA, but then decided on Mainz.

He works at the IMB in proteomics.

There is a loud hum around him.

These are the large mass spectrometers that are used to analyze the protein composition in cells and compare cancer cells with healthy cells, for example.

Such a device costs around one million euros.

The institute is a non-profit GmbH of the university.

Around 200 scientists from all over the world research gene activity and genome stability here.

For example, they investigate the question of why people get cancer or other, often age-related diseases.

And the question of why people age at all - after all, from a purely biological point of view, the body doesn't have to do that at all.

It is basic research that has the potential to change our lives as radically as possible.