 Riems is home to the oldest virological research institution in the world, now called the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, which was built by Friedrich Loeffler in 1910.Loeffler, a professor at the University of Greifswald, ran filtration tests in 1898 and found that the dangerous foot-and-mouth disease was not a bacterium, but a previously unknown class he called "the smallest of all organisms".He had determined it to be a virus.