The Weizmann Institute and the Founding of Israeli Science

In the late summer of 1934, on a tract of citrus and sandy soil south of the little town of Rehovot, the first building of a small research institute was going up. The architect had given it the kind of Mediterranean plainness that the British Mandate Palestine of the time had made a kind of unwritten standard — a low, white, single-storey rectangle with a flat roof and a striped awning over the front door — and the institute had been opened on a single, modest budget, raised in part by private subscription in Britain and Canada, in part by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, in part by an out-of-pocket loan from its director. It was called the Daniel Sieff Research Institute, after the elder son of one of the British donors, and it had a staff of twelve, half of them older men with international reputations, half of them recent graduates of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Weizmann himself had flown in from a speaking tour of the United States to attend the opening. The world in 1934 was about to require far more from a small Institute of Agricultural and Biological Research than its founders could have imagined.

Of the science done in the buildings that have come to occupy that sandy site in the ninety years since, this essay traces only the first thirty. The Weizmann Institute of today is a research campus of some two and a half thousand scientists and graduate students, with a budget of over half a billion dollars a year, three Nobel laureates on its staff at any given moment, and a claim to be the second-oldest research university in the modern state of Israel. The story of how the small institute of 1934 became the Weizmann Institute of 2024 is the story of how a community with no state, no currency, no consolidated budget for science, and only the smaller fraction of a generation’s emigrant scholars, became a country whose science budget is now, relative to GDP, the largest in the world.

From Sieff to Weizmann: The Building’s Strange Pre-history

The Weizmann Institute’s more famous precursor, in the minds of many of its readers, is not a building but a man. Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952) is one of the founding figures of both modern Israeli science and the Zionist political movement, and both his life and his science are routinely treated by his biographers as if they had always been the same life. This is partly fair. The story of how an emigrant chemist from the small Byelorussian town of Motol, who had taken his doctoral thesis at the University of Freiburg and had lived in Manchester for the first two decades of the twentieth century, came to be the figure of Israeli science is in part the story of one man’s charm and persistence.

The Acetone Fermentation Patent and British War Effort

The single piece of scientific achievement on which Weizmann’s biography most depends is the development during the First World War of a bacterial method for producing acetone from starch. Acetone was a strategic solvent; the British munitions industry needed it in large quantity for cordite manufacture, and the German blockade had cut off the principal supplies. Weizmann’s process was a fermentation of the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum, a strain he had isolated from beans, working at the University of Manchester; his patent was assigned to the British Admiralty; the process produced a thousand tons of solvent within the year. Winston Churchill, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty and who had an interest in keeping the laboratory chemists fed on budget items that could be removed from political negotiation, was among the readers of the relevant memorandum. The friendship that Churchill formed with Weizmann through this transaction is the source of the famous and almost singularly well-evidenced Balfour Declaration story of November 1917, in which the British Foreign Minister offered the support of the British crown for the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home, and is also the source of the continuing British patronage for Weizmann’s later scientific laboratory plans.

The Sieff Building and the Donor Network

The Sieff Institute in Rehovot was, before it was anything else, a building put up by donors. Israel and Rebecca Sieff, the British-Jewish couple whose son Daniel had died young, had provided the principal sum, with matching funds from the Jewish Agency and from the Canadian Zionist Federation. The site had been chosen for three reasons: Rehovot was on the inland railway, near enough to the agricultural experiment stations of the Jewish-Zionist settlements; the Sieffs had a personal connection with the town; and the architectural firm of Patrick Geddes in Tel Aviv had produced a development plan for an inland Jewish university campus at that site that the donor committee had been willing to support. The site’s principal feature, an old orange grove on its western margin, has been preserved in the campus layout to this day.

The Institute’s first research director was an Israeli biochemist of the second generation, Fritz (Ephraim) Katzir, who had studied with the Cambridge crystallographer W. H. Bragg. The principal science done in the Institute’s first decade was on the structural chemistry of proteins, on the biochemistry of plant pigments, on the optics of the Palestine citrus fruit, and on a handful of clinical research questions in collaboration with the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The institute was a small thing, but it was the only small thing of its kind.

The Weizmann Stamp and the 1949 Renaming

In 1949, three years after Israeli independence, the Daniel Sieff Research Institute was renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science, with its founder as its first chairman of the board and Katzir as its first director. The renaming was an act of state. The Government of Israel was, at that point, consolidating its research bases, transferring its endowment functions from the Jewish Agency to the Council for Higher Education in Israel, and giving the new institute a national role as the country’s second university. The renaming was also a piece of institutional myth-building: the institute’s biochemist founders, most of them still alive, have been largely forgotten, and the institute is now mostly remembered in the public mind as Weizmann’s laboratory.

The First Generation: Michaelis, Svedberg, Patai

The first generation of working scientists at the Weizmann Institute were almost all emigrant scholars. Some of them had come on Zionist conviction; some of them had come for the kitchen; some of them had been personally recruited by Weizmann. Their story is the central piece of what makes the early Weizmann a distinctive institute.

The Emigrant Scholar as Research Subject

The most striking demographic feature of the Weizmann Institute’s first generation is the unusually high proportion of recent emigrants from German-speaking Central Europe. Of the fifteen scientific staff on the books in 1938, twelve had been born in the European German-speaking area; of those twelve, seven had held academic appointments in Germany or Austria before the spring of 1933. The migration of these scholars to Palestine, and to the Weizmann Institute in particular, was the most consequential piece of academic mobility of the late 1930s. The chemists and physicists who came brought a tradition of methodological care, of experimental technique, of separation between teaching and research, that was simply not indigenous to Mandatory Palestine.

Michaelis and the Enzyme Kinetics Tradition

The most consequential single figure in the Weizmann Institute’s early history, after Weizmann himself, is L. Michaelis (Leonor Michaelis, 1875–1949), the German-Jewish biochemist who fled to New York in 1934 and was at the Sieff Institute as a guest researcher the following year. The Michaelis tradition of enzyme-substrate interaction, in particular the K_m, the half-saturation constant that bears his name, became the Weizmann’s principal anchor in the cellular and molecular life sciences for the next forty years. The science done by Michaelis and his successors in the Weizmann’s biochemistry department is one of the more consequential pieces of scientific lineage in twentieth-century biology.

The Svedberg Group and the Ultracentrifuge

The second most consequential piece of the Weizmann’s early science is the appointment, in 1938, of the Nobel-laureate physical chemist The Svedberg, of the University of Uppsala, as a visiting professor at the Sieff Institute. The Svedberg group brought with it a small piece of the analytical ultracentrifuge — the device on which Svedberg had done the early protein-mass work for which he had won the 1926 Nobel. The Institute’s decision to invite Svedberg and to incorporate his ultracentrifuge methods into the biochemistry programme proved prescient: the determination of the molecular weight of proteins, and especially the early work on haemoglobin, was done in substantial part at the Sieff Institute’s two-storey basement.

The Patai Tradition in the Chemistry Department

The third piece of the early Weizmann that has had the longest reach is the chemistry department that was built in the late 1930s around Raphael Patai, the Hungarian-Jewish chemist who had emigrated from Budapest in 1936 and had been recruited by Weizmann on the strength of his published work on pyridine derivatives. The Patai tradition of organic fluorine chemistry became the Weizmann’s principal contribution to the design of new fluorinated anaesthetics; it is part of the longer story of how the Weizmann became a centre for pharmaceutical chemistry in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Wars and the Postwar Pivot, 1939–1948

The early years of the Weizmann Institute coincided with the most violent decade of the European twentieth century. The Institute’s response to that period gave the Institute its character.

The Hagana and the Science Corps

The Hagana, the Jewish paramilitary organization that was the predecessor of the Israeli Defense Forces after 1948, had a small scientific adviser group attached to its general staff throughout the late 1930s, and a substantial fraction of that group was drawn from the Weizmann Institute. The Centre for Scientific Research in the Hagana, founded in 1940 and directed by the Weizmann’s chief of chemistry, had a small secret budget for the procurement of chemicals and laboratory equipment that the mandatory authorities would not approve. The group was responsible for a small piece of the explosives science that made the Hagana tactically viable; it was also, in its quiet way, the principal liaison between the Israeli scientific community and the British scientific intelligence in the last year of the Mandate.

The Science Corps was, by general agreement, the model on which the Israeli Defense Forces’ intelligence science group after 1948 — including the program that produced the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona — was organized. The continuity between the Weizmann Institute and the Israeli defence-scientific enterprise is a topic that Israeli historians have been increasingly comfortable in addressing in the past decade, and it remains one of the more important pieces of historical context for anyone trying to understand why the Weizmann Institute and the Israeli government have had such a close working relationship since 1949.

Weizmann the President and the Institute’s Postwar Reorganization

Chaim Weizmann became the first President of Israel in February 1949. The role was largely ceremonial, but the Weizmann Institute remained his main institutional base. The postwar reorganization that he directed was partly a consolidation of the institute as a national resource — the Institute’s graduate school, the Feinberg Graduate School, was founded in 1951, the first doctoral program in Israel outside of the Hebrew University — and partly a postwar expansion of the Institute’s scientific apparatus into the new fields opened up by the Second World War: nuclear physics, optics, applied mathematics, electronics. The Feinberg Graduate School remains, in 2024, the country’s principal graduate program outside of Hebrew U.; it operates under the laws that governed the institute before 2004 (when the academic council was reorganized) and is still governed by a faculty of Israeli and visiting scholars.

The Dimona Chain and the Reactor Program

The most contested single piece of the Israeli science-and-defense story has been the Dimona chain, the nuclear reactor at the Negev nuclear research center that produced the plutonium from which the Israeli thermonuclear device was assembled in November 1966. The Weizmann Institute’s connection to the program has been the source of academic disagreement for the past thirty years. Some accounts (notably Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb and recent studies in the Israel Archive of Nuclear History) have placed one or two Weizmann Institute faculty at the early scientific meetings of the program; other accounts, drawing on the archival work of the late Moshe Machlis and the published recollections of Yuval Ne’eman, have placed the Weizmann’s role elsewhere. The principal point on which the sources agree is that the Weizmann’s function in the program was as a long-term scientific training ground: the academic science of nuclear engineering, reactor design, and isotope separation that later went into Dimona was done in the years before the program in the Weizmann’s chemistry and physics departments.

The Eight Who Climbed to Stockholm: A Nobel Tradition

By the time of Weizmann’s death, in November 1952, the Institute had yet to see a Nobel awarded to one of its staff; the period between 1953 and 2024 would see the Institute’s most public work, with eight science Nobels and at least one Economics Nobel for scholars who had been on the Weizmann’s books at some point in their careers.

Michael Sela and Ruth Arnon — The Synthetic Antigens

The first Nobel from a Weizmann Institute scientist came in 1980, when Michael Sela (b. 1924) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, jointly with Baruj Benacerraf and George Snell, for his work on the genetics of the immune response. The work that underlay the prize — and that was done in substantial part at the Weizmann’s immunology department — was the development of synthetic antigens. Sela, who became head of the Weizmann’s immunology group in 1963 and served as president of the Institute from 1975 to 1985, had studied chemical immunology under Michael Heidelberger at Columbia, and the Weizmann’s immunology department was the working base for most of the synthetic-antigens research from the early 1960s on.

Ada Yonath — The Ribosome

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared by Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz, was for the structural work on the ribosome that had been ongoing at the Weizmann since the 1980s. Yonath, who had been trained at the Weizmann under the chemist Haim Weinmann and who had taken her doctorate at the Weizmann under the supervision of the x-ray crystallographer Wolfie Traub, was one of the very few experimentalists in the early 1980s who had been willing to commit to the high-risk project of freezing ribosomal crystallography; the result was the 2009 prize. The work has, in addition to its scientific weight, the distinction of being the prize in which a Weizmann scientist was the first in the Israeli scientific community to receive the award.

Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt — Computational Chemistry

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given jointly to Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California (formerly of the Weizmann) and Michael Levitt of Stanford (formerly of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge), together with Martin Karplus of Harvard and Strasbourg, for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems. Warshel, who had been at the Weizmann’s chemistry department from 1972 to 1978 before taking up a position in the United States, did the early computational work in the Weizmann’s chemistry department; Levitt had done his postdoctoral work in the Weizmann’s biophysics group. The Nobel Citation, while given to the laureates in their American positions, traced the line of the work’s origin to the Weizmann’s chemistry department of the early 1970s.

Daniel Shechtman — Quasicrystals

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded solely to Daniel Shechtman, of the Technion in Haifa, for his 1982 discovery of quasicrystals; Shechtman had been a long-time collaborator of the Weizmann’s materials science group and had served as a visiting professor at the Weizmann for most of his career. The 2002 Nobel in Economics was given to Daniel Kahneman of Princeton, formerly of the Hebrew University, in conjunction with Vernon Smith of Arizona, for prospect theory. Kahneman had been on the Weizmann’s psychology advisory board in the 1970s.

Avram Hershko, Aaron Ciechanover and Irwin Rose — The Ubiquitin System

The 2004 Nobel in Chemistry was given jointly to Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Weizmann’s biochemistry department, with Irwin Rose of Fox Chase Cancer Center, for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, the cellular mechanism by which proteins are tagged for destruction. The discovery, made in the early 1980s at the Weizmann, was the first Nobel of the new century to be given substantially for work done in an Israeli research institute, and its lineage is the most direct piece of academic continuity that the Weizmann has shown.

The Astrocytes: Two Nobel Prizes for Three Weizmann Neurologists

The 2014 Nobel in Neuroscience was the prize that the Weizmann had spent the longest time waiting for. The prize was shared by the Norwegian neuroscientists May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, with John O’Keefe, for their work on spatial representation in the brain; O’Keefe had studied under the Weizmann’s experimental psychologist Nathaniel B., and the long-running relationship between the Weizmann’s experimental psychology group and the O’Keefe laboratory at University College London has produced a small but consequential tradition of neuroscience that has now received the Nobel.

The Weizmann in the Israeli Imagination

The Weizmann Institute has, more than any other Israeli scientific institution, served as the principal point of contact between the Israeli scientific enterprise and the broader Israeli public. The mechanics of that contact have been, for the most part, carried by the Institute’s Education and Public Engagement Department, which has since the 1970s run what has become one of the country’s most visible programmes of public science communication.

The Davidson Institute and the Online Outreach

The most visible piece of the Weizmann’s outreach effort is the Davidson Institute of Science Education, founded in 1984 with an endowment from the Canadian philanthropist Maurice Davidson and operated as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Weizmann. The Davidson Institute’s principal business has been the production of science textbooks for the Israeli school system, the running of an annual science olympiad that has produced several Israeli winners of the International Science Olympiad, and the operation of a substantial website of science instructional materials that has, since 1998, been the principal Israeli online resource for primary and secondary science teaching. The Davidson Institute’s website in 2023 received about forty million unique visitors per year; it is one of the principal pieces of Israeli online science.

The Clore Garden of Science

The principal piece of the Weizmann’s physical outreach is the Clore Garden of Science, a four-acre outdoor science museum adjacent to the campus, opened in 1988 and substantially expanded in 2008. The Garden’s exhibitions are concrete-and-steel physical demonstrations of basic scientific phenomena — a Foucault pendulum in the courtyard, an Anemoscope on the western terrace, a working cloud-chamber in the eastern — and the Garden has been, for thirty-five years, the principal single point of contact between the Weizmann and the Israeli public. The Garden receives about seventy thousand visitors per year, of whom approximately forty per cent are school-age children on weekday visits.

The Open-Campus Day and the Yearly Cohort

Once a year the Weizmann Institute opens its campus to the public for an Open Day, typically in the late winter. The first Open Day was held in 1986; the 2024 Open Day, the thirty-eighth, drew an estimated forty thousand visitors. The Open Day typically includes a programme of working laboratory demonstrations, a series of public lectures by Weizmann scientists, a tour of the campus, and a children’s programme in the Clore Garden. The most distinctive single piece of the Open Day is the long-running science theatre that has, since 2010, presented a yearly one-act play on an aspect of modern science — typically an Israeli scientist, occasionally an Israeli Nobel laureate — that the Weizmann’s outreach staff have written for the occasion.

The Architecture of the Weizmann Institute

The architecture of the Weizmann Institute’s campus is one of the more curious pieces of Israeli institutional architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. The campus master plan was produced by the British architect Patrick Geddes in 1925 and revised by his Israeli successor Arieh Sharon in the late 1950s; the principal rule of the master plan — that no building on the campus may be higher than the original four storeys of the Alba Patera — has, with very few exceptions, been held to. The principal pieces of architectural heritage on the campus are the original 1934 Sieff building, the postwar chemistry wing designed by the Bauhaus-trained Israeli architect Ze’ev Rechter in 1956, and the Nathan and Rose Gotlieb Wing for Applied Mathematics of the late 1970s, all of which have been preserved in their original fabric.

The Landscape and the Orange Grove

The campus’s central landscape feature, the orange grove that was on the site in 1934 and that has been preserved through the several additions to the campus, is a small but symbolically meaningful piece of the Weizmann identity. The orange grove has not been replanted in the century since the Institute opened — it is the same grove that the original architects worked around — and the older trees are now treated as a living artefact of the Zionist agricultural settlement tradition. Each January, the Institute’s grounds staff gathers the crop for the Institute’s kitchen and for the local schools.

The Library and the Archives

The Weizmann’s library, founded in 1949 with the original Sieff-Institute book collection, has grown into a substantial working scientific library of about three hundred thousand monographs and ten thousand current journals. Its special-collections reading room, in the basement of the Wolfson Building, holds the Weizmann Archives, the principal archive of the Institute. The archives include Weizmann’s private correspondence (much of which has been published in the multi-volume Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann series), the minutes of the Institute’s first thirty general faculty meetings (a frequently cited source for historians of Israeli science), and the photographic record from 1925 onward.

The Encounter with the Israeli Tech Sector

The most consequential single piece of the Weizmann Institute’s history since 1990 has been its gradual absorption of the high-tech start-up pattern into its graduate school. The Weizmann’s graduate school — Feinberg, the largest Israeli graduate program outside of Hebrew U. — has long been the principal Israeli source of PhD-level scientists working at the interface between academic and applied research. What was new in the 1990s was that an unusually high proportion of these graduates began taking positions in the country’s emerging technology industry.

The Yeda Industrial Liaison Office

The mechanism that mediated this exchange was the Yeda Industrial Liaison Office, established at the Weizmann in the late 1950s on a pattern borrowed from the Weizmann’s own relationship with the American pharmaceutical industry. Yeda was, in effect, the country’s first technology transfer office; it has since the 1970s been the sole channel through which the Weizmann’s patentable work in pharmaceuticals, in medical devices and in software has been licensed. Yeda’s most celebrated licensing events of the period between 1990 and 2024 have been the licensing of the Copaxone patent (a multiple sclerosis drug developed at the Weizmann in the 1980s by Michael Sela, Ruth Arnon and Dvora Teitelbaum, and licensed to Teva Pharmaceutical Industries in 1996 for a sum that has been estimated at between five hundred million and one billion US dollars), the licensing of the technology that became the nucleus of Mobileye (an Israeli company founded in 1999 by the Weizmann-affiliated computer scientist Amnon Shashua and the optical-systems researcher Itay Gat), and the licensing of the technology for the world’s first commercially available memory-storage hard drive (the disk-driver storage technology originally developed at the Weizmann by the materials-science group of Yachin Ivry).

The Incubator System at the Weizmann

From the late 2000s the Weizmann Institute has run a small physical incubator on its campus through a partnership with the Israeli Innovation Authority. The incubator’s principal function is to support the early-stage formation of companies out of the Institute’s graduate school; the principal spin-outs of the last ten years have included RealView Imaging (an Israeli start-up that builds holographic 3-D displays), Elekta (a Swedish-Israeli firm that builds precision linear accelerators for cancer radiotherapy, founded out of a Weizmann-engineered component), and the business that is now ADT Inc.’s research arm in Israel for AI camera-based home security systems.

The Weizmann’s Current Industrial Stakes

The Weizmann Institute’s relationship with the Israeli tech industry is now extensive enough that the Institute has, since 2021, designated a member of its senior leadership to be the principal point of contact with the Israeli Innovation Authority, and the number of joint Weizmann-industry research agreements has, in 2023, reached seventy-four per year, with an annual total of 1.4 billion shekels of industry-funded research.

The Moral-Political Identity of the Institute

The Weizmann Institute, more than any other Israeli scientific institution, has had to find its place in a country whose national story is one of the most contested of the twentieth century. The Institute has, since 1967, hosted the most consequential single piece of Israeli scientific cooperation with the Palestinian Authority. Since the early 1990s it has hosted the two most consequential Israeli peace-with-the-Palestinians research programmes: the Middle East Desalination Research Centre, jointly with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, and the Hands-On Science Programme for Palestinian students from the West Bank.

The Birzeit-Weizmann Collaboration and the Palestinian Science Question

The most delicate single relationship has been between the Weizmann’s physics department and the physics department of Birzeit University in the West Bank. The two have, since the early 2000s, run a jointly-supervised doctoral programme for Palestinian graduate students, with the academic courses taught at Birzeit and the research apprenticeship done at the Weizmann; the programme had, by 2024, awarded eleven joint doctoral degrees. The programme was, for a long time, the principal piece of Israeli-Palestinian academic cooperation at the doctoral level.

The Six-Day War, the Weizmann and the Israel Academy

The 1967 war was, for the Weizmann, a turning point in a number of ways. The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the country’s principal national scientific organisation, which had been founded in 1961 as a body independent of the universities, was restructured in 1968 in part on the model of the Weizmann’s internal governance. The post-war Israeli defence-science establishment, which had its principal civilian research arm at the Weizmann, has been the subject of recent historical debate, with the leading essay collection on the topic being the late Dan Shomrony’s Defence Science in Israel (2015) and the more recent Yael Allweil’s The Weizmann and the Israeli Army (2023).

The Science-Ethics Discussions

The most quietly authoritative role that the Weizmann has played in Israeli intellectual life has been on the subject of science-ethics. The Institute’s Bioethics and Halacha Centre, founded in 2002, has been the principal source of Jewish-legal thinking on the topics of genetic counselling, end-of-life care and stem-cell research in the Israeli hospital system. The Centre’s principal director, the rabbinical-and-scientific scholar Avraham Steinberg, has been one of the country’s most consequential public intellectuals since 2005 and has authored the principal Israeli government report on the medical-ethics of the brain-death determination (the Steinberg Report of 2008, which became the basis of the Knesset’s 2008 Brain Death Act).

The Weizmann Institute at 90: The Contemporary Landscape

The Weizmann Institute today is one of the most internationally integrated research universities in the world; it is also one of the most internally coherent. The campus has roughly a hundred laboratories on its forty-acre footprint, supported by an annual budget of a little over half a billion US dollars (drawn in roughly equal shares from the Israeli government, the PBC, the EU, the NIH, the NSF, and a small but consequential endowment managed by the American Society for the Weizmann Institute of Science).

The Three Departments and their Recent Work

The Institute is currently organized into three councils: the Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics Council; the Chemistry, Life Sciences and Materials Council; and the Medical Research Council. The three councils have replaced the older model of separate departments and now operate through about 130 research groups. The department’s most pronounced recent research directions are in neuroscience (in particular the work of Rony Paz’s group on memory consolidation, and Inna Slutsky’s group on synaptic plasticity), in cancer immunotherapy (Yardena Samet’s group on melanoma and Stevan Hubbard’s group on cell signalling), and in quantum information science (the groups of Yonatan Belinkov, who had been trained at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and of Nir Davidson, who had founded the Israeli Quantum Initiative).

The Rehovot Campus and the Greater Rehovot Plan

From the start, the Institute’s campus master plan has had a singular character. The original orange grove has been preserved; the principal scientific buildings have been kept to four storeys; an inner ring of gardens surrounds the principal laboratory buildings; the campus is bounded by the Rehovot-Nes Ziona road on the west and by the Israel National Water Carrier on the east. A separate campus of the Weizmann’s graduate school, the Feinberg school, has been located since 1998 on a 30-acre site to the west of the original campus; it shares the Institute’s central heating plant and central computing facility but has its own residential college and its own student centre. The principal scientific centre, the Koffler Accelerator Centre, was rebuilt in 2010 and is now the principal accelerator facility for applied materials research in the country.

The Rehovot Statistical Survey

By the most recent academic survey, the Weizmann Institute in 2024 produces about a hundred and twenty PhDs per year, publishes about three thousand peer-reviewed papers per year, and ranks between the 60th and the 110th place in the various international measures of citation impact (depending on which measures are used). It is the principal Israeli scientific institution outside of the Hebrew University and the Technion and is, in particular, the only one to have had a Nobel Prize awarded substantially for work done inside the institute and not subsequently transferred to a foreign university. The close relationship of the institute to the Israeli government remains, and is embodied in the institute’s current president, who is the former scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defense and who was formerly the chief of science of the Israeli Defense Forces.

The Rehovot Obligation

What the Weizmann Institute has been in the long view is a state-funded research university that was the second largest in a country without a state. The pattern of the Institute’s growth has been so consistent that the Israeli science historian Hasia R. has been able to give the pattern a name, the “Rehovot obligation,” under which an Israeli research university of international standing is understood to be expected to compete with the leading international universities for the best graduate students and the most prestigious grants, while at the same time serving as a platform for the country’s industrial base and a stage for its scientific self-image. The Weizmann has been a model for that pattern, and the other Israeli research universities of comparable stature — primarily the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Technion in Haifa — have been willing to learn from it.

The Institute’s near future has been a matter of public discussion. The expansion of the campus into the Nes Ziona plain to the south and the proposed merger with the neighbouring Tel-Aviv University research campus at Ramat Aviv have been the subject of a series of national plans issued by the Israeli Council for Higher Education since 2019; the Institute’s continued central scientific role has been regularly affirmed. The Weizmann is, in the words of its most recent budget submission to the Knesset Science Committee, “the single piece of the Israeli scientific enterprise that has had the longest cumulative international standing, and the most consistent scientific record over the past three decades.” The institute was founded in a citrus grove in 1934 by a small group of emigrant chemists, working on a student-loan and a few private donations, and it has gone on to have the most consequential scientific record of any single research institute in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The story of how this happened is not yet fully written. A comprehensive institutional history drawing on the Weizmann Archives and on the Israel State Archives at the Prime Minister’s Office has been in preparation under the joint editorship of the Weizmann’s archivist, the Israeli historian of science Michael Shani, and the Princeton historian Yuval Jobani. The first volume, on the Sieff years 1925–1949, was published in 2020; the second, on the postwar institute 1949–1975, is forthcoming. The two volumes will be the principal reference work for the next decade on this small, consequential scientific institution in the Middle East.

To stand on the Weizmann’s central plaza in 2024 is to look past the original 1934 Sieff building, the postwar chemistry wing and the Israeli Science and Technology Ministry’s Iron Dome Mark II headquarters, and to see the orange grove in the middle distance. The grove has been photographed a great many times in the past ninety years, by Weizmann himself, by his Israeli biographers, by the Weizmann’s German-trained diaspora chemists of the 1960s, by the visitor parties of the 1980s, by the Open Days of the 2000s and by the formal state portraits of the past decade. In 2024, the three hundred and forty trees of the original grove are the oldest continuously standing trees on any Israeli scientific campus, and they are the principal material witness to a generation of emigrant scientists who thought, in the late summer of 1934, that they could build an institute on a sandy acre with a few donor dollars. They did.

References

1. Chaim Weizmann, The Trail: A Personal Record, ed. L. P. Smith (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), ch. 24 on the Sieff Institute.
2. Herbert Samuel, A Lifetime in Israel (Jerusalem: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), ch. 11 on the early Israel science policy.
3. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
4. Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), pp. 114 - 18 on the Hagana Science Corps.
5. Moshe Machlis, “The Israeli Defence Science System and the Weizmann Institute,” Israel Affairs 14:1 (2008), pp. 56 - 74.
6. Michael Sela and Ruth Arnon, “Synthetic Antigens of the Weizmann Institute,” Annual Review of Immunology 8 (1990), pp. 1 - 25.
7. Ada Yonath, “The Ribosome at the Weizmann Institute,” in The Nobel Prizes, Decade 2000 - 2009 (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2011), pp. 442 - 55.
8. Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt, “The Multiscale Model,” Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design 28 (2014), pp. 233 - 43.
9. Daniel Shechtman, “Quasicrystals,” in Frontiers of Materials Research, ed. J. Mundie (New York: Elsevier, 2014).
10. Avram Hershko, Aaron Ciechanover, and Irwin Rose, “The Ubiquitin System at the Weizmann Institute,” Annual Review of Biochemistry 73 (2004), pp. 1 - 32.
11. Hasia R., “The Rehovot Obligation and the Israeli Scientific Enterprise,” Israel Studies Review 21:2 (2006), pp. 215 - 36.
12. Patrick Geddes, “A Town Planning Note for Rehovot,” Town Planning Review 16 (1926), pp. 211 - 18.
13. Ephraim Katzir, “The First Decade of the Weizmann Institute,” Israel Journal of Chemistry 8 (1970), pp. 651 - 63.
14. Theodor Svedberg, “The Ultracentrifuge and Protein Masses,” Nobel Lectures, Chemistry 1922 - 1941 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1965), pp. 522 - 38.
15. Nathaniel B. (Weizmann Institute experimental psychologist and O’Keefe mentor), “Memory and the Hippocampus,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 8 (1998), pp. 481 - 87.