Research: Miracles at Rehovot

Beset by belligerent enemies, Israel has put its scientists and engineers to work overtime on defense projects. It already produces 95% of its own ammunition, and soon may even make its own nuclear weapons. For all their military efforts, however, Israeli scientists have not ignored peaceful research. They have developed new irrigation techniques, tapped solar energy, bred deep-sea fish in captivity and even solved the riddle of how the camel stores water (in the bloodstream). As the late Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first President, once explained: "Of course, miracles happen, but it needs hard work to make them."

No Israelis work harder at miracle making than the men and women of the famed research center that bears his name. Now marking its 25th anniversary, the Weizmann Institute for Science has grown from an obscure agriculture station in the desert town of Rehovot, 15 miles south of Tel Aviv, to a 250-acre complex with 17 major departments that explore everything from atomic physics and molecular biology to seismology. Even the Arabs recognize its importance. It was one of the first targets that Radio Cairo claimed had been destroyed during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war—though not a single Egyptian plane ever appeared over Rehovot.

Handsome Payoff. Israelis sometimes wonder whether they can really afford such an expensive scientific establishment. Yet it regularly produces so many scientific dividends that its irrepressible president, Meyer Weisgal, 75, a former Broadway impresario, leaves on fund-raising tours with these parting words to his scientists: "Boys and girls, I am going to tell many lies about you and the Weizmann Institute. When I come back, I want all the lies to be true."

Often they are. Thanks to the institute's experiments, hardy new strains of wheat and barley now thrive in the sun-baked Israeli soil. In medicine, its scientists have developed a tiny, magnetic catheter that can travel through human blood vessels to reach the remotest regions of the body. As the world's leading producer of "heavy oxygen," the institute supplies these radioactive isotopes for tracer work to labs around the globe. One of its most ingenious feats was achieved by Biophysicist Aaron Katchalsky, who used synthetic fibers to duplicate the perplexing process by which muscles convert raw chemical energy into mechanical force.

A renowned chemist himself, Chaim Weizmann had originally hoped to establish a haven in Rehovot for émigré Jewish scientists. A number of illustrious names—Einstein, Bohr, Von Neumann —did advise the institute in its early years, but none chose to make it their permanent home. Instead of importing a scientific elite, Israel was forced to produce its own; 80% of the institute's permanent staff is Israeli. Unlike many labs elsewhere, it enjoys what its scientific council chief, Mathematician Joseph Gillis, calls "a negative brain drain": far more scientists are trying to get in than to leave.