I’ve mentioned previously that my wife’s building at Weizmann was rendered unusable as a result of some ballistic missiles the fun-loving Moslems running Iran gifted us. What I didn’t mention is that she has been in that same building, the Wolfson Building, since she first started as a student at Weizmann in the fall of 1991. Most of the time during her doctorate she was on the sixth floor, working in the lab of Zelig Eshhar. As an outsider studying in a different department, one of the things that impressed me about Zelig was that he seemed to have a good handle on how to manage his research group: he wasn’t a slave driver, and from time to time to group went out for fun off-campus. Eight years ago, I also wrote a piece about how he stood to make quite a chunk of change due to the licensing of patents concerning techniques for modifying a patient’s own T-cells to target them to cancerous cells (methods that are now in use), and how his story illustrated the difference between getting credit for one’s scientific contributions and getting money for commercializing an idea. And for those who are into patent trivia, Zelig’s name is forever enshrined in the caption of a 2005 Federal Circuit opinion, Capon v. Eshhar.
Zelig died yesterday after a prolonged period of dementia, and is being buried as I write. If one is into symbolism, I suppose one could say something about how Zelig’s passing in close temporal proximity to the damage to the building that housed his lab symbolically marks the end of an era, or something like that. Except that Wolfson will be repaired, just as Weizmann will repair or rebuild all the damaged or destroyed buildings. Most people who go into scientific research for a living do so because they’re driven to do the research, and a couple of missiles aren’t going to stop them. And with regard to Zelig, in addition to pioneering T-cell therapy, he mentored many students over the years, some of whom (like my wife) have remained in academia and continue to research problems and publish their findings, others of whom work in the biotech industry, researching problems of commercial significance.