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Science in the Promised Land
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14177 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1988 |
2,883 Words |
| Author
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Nechemia Meyers
Nechemia Meyers, affiliated with the Weizmann Institute of
Science in Rehovot, Israel, has previously published two
articles in The World & I: Israel and the Far East: Growing
Links Between Jews and Asians (January 1989) and Bar Kokhba: A
Two-Millennia Debate (July 1990). |
I feel sure that science will bring to this land both peace and a renewal of its youth, creating here the springs of a new spiritual and material life. And here I speak of science for its own sake and of applied science.
--Chaim Weizmann, 1946
In a small, 39-year-old country whose population is comparable to that of a middle-sized metropolitan area in the United States, a great center of scientific research pulses with productive creative energy. Incongruous as it may seem, Israel's Weizmann Institute is conducting research on the frontiers of science in such diverse areas as the nature of cancer, the capture and distribution of solar energy, the breeding of improved food plants, and fifth-generation computers.
With its research activities overseen by an international advisory board of world-class scientists, the institute has established itself as "one of the ten leading scientific research institutions in the world," according to Christian B. Anfinsen, a Nobel laureate at Johns Hopkins University.
That this institute exists and achieves its results, despite the limitations and tribulations facing Israel, is a tribute in great measure to the vision and leadership of its founder, Chaim Weizmann, who was also the founding father of the Jewish state. Weizmann was a distinguished chemist with a burning passion to establish a country for the Jewish people. His determination was that the new Jewish state should excel in intellectual spheres, and particularly in science. Weizmann believed that the establishment of a world-class scientific research institution would prove to be vital for the growth and development of the new Jewish state.
Through Weizmann's teaching, his example, and his dynamic leadership, Israel has been blessed with a host of scientist-politicians whose pursuit of the truth in scientific understanding has been successfully combined with a pursuit of a better state for their countrymen.
Born in the densely Jewish "Pale of Settlement" of czarist white Russia and subsequently educated in Germany and Switzerland, Weizmann first gained scientific prominence in Britain. Particularly well known was his discovery of a bacterium that could transform starch into the acetone urgently required by the British government for the production of explosives during the First World War. Afterward he was to devote most of his time to
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