He had also been a member of DESY, a German-based research center that develops and runs several particle accelerators and detectors, most notably the ZEUS project.
During Balke's term as Minister for Nuclear Energy, the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) was founded, one of
Having studied physics in Berlin, Philadelphia, and Hamburg, he worked as an academic research assistant for the German electron synchrotron named Desy.
From 1975 to 1976 he worked at the University of Freiburg and the Brookhaven National Laboratory (New York), In 1977, he joined DESY in Hamburg to work on the beam optics of the PETRA storage ring.
Désy was recruited by Oscar D. Skelton, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in 1925 to fill the position of Counsellor in Canada's new foreign service.
Together with the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory in the United States, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France and PETRA at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, it is one of the four large (beam energy greater than 5 GeV) synchrotron radiation facilities in the world.