From High-Molecular-Weight Protein Models to Enzyme Engineering: Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science

FROM HIGH-MOLECULAR-WEIGHT PROTEIN MODELS TO ENZYME ENGINEERING: RESEARCH AT THE WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE EPHRAIM KATCHALSKI-KATZIR* Israel is a young country whose scientific development owes much to the help and encouragement of outstanding scientists from many parts of the world. I belong to the first generation of scientists raised and educated in Israel and have borne witness to the immeasurable contribution by our international colleagues to science in Israel from its humble beginnings only half a century ago. My late brother Aharon [1] entered the Hebrew University with the first group of biology students in 1930. I started 2 years later and well remember going up each morning to classes on Mount Scopus, which straddled the unexplored Judean desert to the east and the ancient city to the west. I remember how I hoped even then that through our renascent centers of learning, and in particular through our scientific endeavors , my generation would succeed in building a new society that would be based on the timeless ethical heritage of the Jewish people. Thus I decided at that early stage to devote my life to science and to the building of the future State of Israel. The international tone of Israeli scientific endeavor was set in those early years by the excellent teachers who came to Israel from the great centers of learning in Germany, Austria, Italy, England, Rumania, and Russia. These dedicated individuals embarked on their research activities in virtual isolation from the outside world. They treated us, their small group of students, as friends and as their future scientific heirs. We were privileged indeed to study under world-famous scientists of their caliber. At an early stage of my studies at the Hebrew University I found myself under the spell of the biological sciences. I was overwhelmed by *Professor, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.© 1986 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/86/2932/$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 29, 3, Part 2 ¦ Spring 1986 \ S73 the beauty ofour flora and fauna and enchanted by the geological structure of this region of the Middle East. Our inspiring excursions with Professor Eig into the Judean desert after the rains, when the normally arid landscape came to life and began to throb with color and movement , led me to study plant societies in the Judean desert as my first research project. The Hebrew University, like the State of Israel itself, had started as a dream [2]. The idea had been put forward at the first Zionist Conference in 1897; one of the first to support it was Hermann Schapira, professor of mathematics at the University of Heidelberg. For Chaim Weizmann, who was at that time working as a chemist in Geneva, the university became and remained an absorbing passion. In 1918, he laid the foundation stone on Mount Scopus, and in the ensuing years he continued to nurture the university, aiming to attract to it the greatest intellectual luminaries in the world. Einstein spent some time there; others who lent their active support included Sir Arthur Schuster, Samuel Alexander, Niels Bohr, and Lord Rutherford. In 1925, the original Departments of Chemistry and Microbiology were opened. By 1935, the Faculty of Science consisted of departments of mathematics, physics, biochemistry, botany, zoology, geology, meteorology and climatology, bacteriology, parasitology, and physiology. The inclusion of a medical school within the university had been envisaged from the very beginning [3]. Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, had begun its work of healing in Palestine in 1913, when two nurses from America had been sent to a welfare station set up in Jerusalem for maternity care and the treatment of trachoma. Five years later Hadassah had equipped a medical unit of some 40 physicians and nurses to bring aid to war-torn Palestine. From this unit evolved the Hadassah Medical Organization, which today is a major force in the promotion of medical research in Israel. In 1936, Hadassah and the university embarked on joint action that led to the establishment , 13 years later, of the Hebrew University—Hadassah Medical School. On the new university campus the Departments of Microbiology and Parasitology, headed by Saul...