Israel's first president was a chemist whose bacteria helped make British explosives
Chaim Weizmann is remembered as a Zionist statesman and Israel's first president. He was also the father of industrial fermentation: a bacterium he harnessed in Manchester produced acetone for cordite during the First World War, giving him access to British cabinet ministers at a pivotal moment.
Born in 1874 in Motal, then in the Russian Empire and now in Belarus, he was the third of 15 children of a timber merchant. He showed a gift for chemistry at school in Pinsk, studied in Darmstadt and Berlin, and earned a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1899 at Fribourg before lecturing in Geneva. In 1904 he moved to the University of Manchester, and in 1910 became a British citizen with papers signed by Home Secretary Winston Churchill. In Britain he went by Charles Weizmann and registered about 100 patents.
His key discovery used Clostridium acetobutylicum, soon called the Weizmann organism, to ferment starch into acetone, butanol and ethanol. When the war created an acute need for acetone, Churchill and David Lloyd George backed scaling it up. Trials ran in a London gin factory in 1915, and six requisitioned distilleries were producing by 1916, eventually making 30,000 tonnes. When maize ran short, Britain organised a national collection of horse chestnuts for starch.
The work opened doors. Weizmann had met Arthur Balfour in Manchester around 1905, when Balfour favoured a British offer of land in Uganda. Weizmann is credited with later persuading him, as Foreign Secretary, to back a Jewish homeland in Palestine; the story goes that he asked Balfour whether he would swap London for Saskatchewan. The Balfour Declaration followed in 1917. He also pushed for a Jewish university, an idea that led to the Technion in 1912 and later the Hebrew University.
In 1934 his efforts created a research institute in Rehovot, funded by Israel Sieff and now bearing Weizmann's own name, and he ran it after Fritz Haber died before taking up the post. During the Second World War he advised on synthetic rubber and high-octane fuel, and his younger son Michael, an RAF pilot, was lost over the Bay of Biscay in 1942. Elected president of Israel on 16 February 1949, he served until his death in 1952.
Source: Chaim Weizmann
