[3][4] Like many leading academics in the German Democratic Republic, Werner Scheler also pursued a career in national politics.
In 1971 he was appointed Director of the Research Centre for Molecular Biology and Medicine, a newly established branch of the National Academy of Sciences based on the north side of Berlin.
[2] The Academy itself was disbanded in the wake of German Reunification, which meant that Werner Scheler was actually its penultimate president.
[8] After the war ended, with Thuringia now administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone in what remained of Germany, he joined the German Communist Party.
The KB was one of the Soviet style formally approved Mass Organisations that were a feature of the country's constitutional arrangements.
Although not political parties in the western sense, East Germany's mass organisations each received a fixed quota of seats in the National Legislative Assembly (Volkskammer).
In 1981 he also received a new nomination from the Kulturbund to sit as an organisation representative in the Volkskammer: this position, too, he retained till the East German political structure crumbled in 1989.
Since 1993 he has been a member of the Leibnitz Society of Scientists which in many respects is the successor organisation to the old (East) German Academy of Sciences.