Celebrated Israeli science hub rebuilding from devastating Iranian missile strike

Israel’s much-celebrated Weizmann Institute marked its 90th anniversary last year, but is suddenly facing one of its greatest challenges: the Weizmann Institute of Science’s campus in Rehovot was struck by two Iranian ballistic missiles in June.

Among the hardest-hit buildings and labs were the institute’s hub for world-leading cancer research, which also housed core facilities many groups rely on for their life sciences work — labs using AI to develop personalized medicine for diseases without a cure, and a building home to many breakthroughs in climate science and astronomy.

No building was unscathed. Across campus, the labs of 52 research groups conducting groundbreaking science were affected, all of which need to be relocated and restocked.

According to Weizmann Canada, it will take years to rebuild, and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Prior to the attack, the institution was home to 23 magnetic resonance scanners, 30 X-ray machines, 610 optical microscopes, and 750 centrifuges. It had 246 visiting scientists from 28 countries, and roughly 2,600 staff.

Weizmann consistently ranks among the top 10 research institutes in the world. They’ve won a hundred prizes, including the Nobel in 2009 for chemistry, exploring how antibiotics function. Their research has netted $34 billion in sales.

Seven of the world’s top 25 drugs were developed there, including the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone. It conducted the foundational research on amniocentesis.

Prof. Roee Ozeri, a physicist specializing in quantum information and quantum computing at the Weizmann Institute of Science, was in Montreal and Toronto recently to promote Weizmann Canada’s Emergency Rebuild Science Campaign.

Ozeri, who led the team that built Israel’s first quantum computer in 2022, is also the institute’s vice-president of development and communication. He spoke to Dave Gordon:

Why do think Israel’s interception system failed to shoot the Iranian missiles?

I think just statistics. You send enough missiles, a few of them go through.

Where were you when the missiles hit, and what happened subsequently?

I was with my family in the shelter in our apartment, at 3 a.m.

The explosions were so nearby and so strong, the entire building was shaking. After we could come out of the shelter, I went to the window to look, and I could see the two smoke towers coming out of campus.

Weitzmann is like a little kibbutz. 70 per cent of our faculty live on campus. So many others came to see what happened, because people were worried about their labs.

Very quickly, there were Home Front command units there, and firefighters, trying to take out the fire.

The first 48 hours, we were trying to stabilize the situation, extract (samples) from laboratories that were hit but not burnt, rescue as many research assets as possible. These are some of the buildings hit: the cancer research centre and immunology research centre. These labs have tumour samples, cultured cells, genetically modified samples.

Irreplaceable?

No. That’s a question that comes up often. I think that science, by definition, is reproducible.

If it’s not reproducible, it’s not science. If you work in an experiment and someone on the other side of Earth cannot reproduce the exact same science, that’s not science by definition. So nothing is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, it takes a lot of time to replace and a lot of effort and sometimes financial resources. So it’s not about irreplaceable; it’s about the effort and the time that caused the setback.

We had no casualties. That’s the most important thing. That’s how science is lost, when you lose the people. That is because we were careful to evacuate everyone from campus.

What was the biggest setback?

One, is physical lab space that we lost. We lost five buildings, seriously damaged. That means it’ll take up to five years to recover those buildings, lost equipment and thousands that were specialized. They can be rebuilt and repurchased, but it takes time. And physical research assets that that were lost.

When you take 52 research groups, which is the number of groups that lost their physical space equipment, and you set them back by a couple of years, you lose potential treatment for disease. Groups that were hit were working on research topics anywhere from blood tests to cancers, and many other examples.

What were some of the interim solutions?

It was very important for us to make sure that the science train was back on its tracks as soon as possible. We purchased prebuilt spaces that we can allocate as office spaces. We rented a building at the biotech area outside the Weitzmann, where we can host research groups. We went out, in a massive procurement of scientific equipment. We’re sharing equipment.

We got offers to help from many institutions, both in and outside of Israel, and we’re very thankful for that, both in terms of equipment, in terms of hosting our scientists, in terms of collaborations.

So it’s very heartening at a time where we’re facing a lot of, shall we say, challenges as Israelis and as Jews, that we have international cooperation in this regard. Listen, I can’t tell you how much you learn to appreciate people who help you at a time of need. Getting help from people when all is quiet, that’s easy.

This interview was edited for brevity.

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