Dozens of Weizmann Institute research labs destroyed by Iranian missile

Established in 1934 by Israel’s first president and prominent scientist, Chaim Weizmann, the Weizmann Institute is a world-leading multidisciplinary research institution in the natural and exact sciences.

Iran is believed to have targeted it in response to Israel eliminating several nuclear scientists in the effort to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.

Some 45 labs were wrecked, including Tzahor’s, whose research focuses on heart biology. A senior academic from Weizmann who wished to remain unnamed told the economic news outlet Calcalist that the estimated cost of building an empty laboratory facility is around $50 million. Providing it with the proper equipment could cost another $50 million.

“It was a war zone,” Tzahor told The Times of Israel over the phone. “Everything in our beautiful institute was covered in glass and pieces of metal.”

Tzahor’s lab, 22 years of work, scientific samples, including thousands of heart tissue from both animals and patients, DNA and RNA samples, and more, were gone.

When the researcher spotted a refrigerator that seemed mostly intact among the ruins, he could not help but try to save something.

“My son-in-law, who had come with me, climbed on the refrigerator and managed to open its door,” he recalled. “We transferred its content to another refrigerator at Weizmann in a building that was not hit.”

“Of course, the samples are supposed to be kept at a temperature of minus 80 degrees Celsius, and by the time we moved them, they were at room temperature, so I’m not sure they can still be used,” he added. “But at least we felt we did something.”

Tzahor was not the only one who jumped into action. In the aftermath of the Iranian attack, students and faculty scrambled to save what was possible.

Biologist Jacob Hanna, who was abroad, told the Nature journal that his students managed to save hundreds of frozen mouse and human cell lines by transferring them to backup liquid-nitrogen tanks he had prepared in the basement of one of the buildings, fearing possible consequences of the multi-front war Israel has been entangled in since October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists infiltrated the country from Gaza killing 1,200 people and wounding thousands.

The strike did not just damage individual labs. Much of the sophisticated equipment that the institute offered its scientists to share is also gone.

“Weizmann is built in a way so that we have a lot of support services, very expensive, very fine machinery that usually one lab can’t afford by itself,” said Dr. Tslil Ast. “Many scientists and labs rely on this equipment for their research. Those services, or at least part of them, have been very severely affected.”

According to Ast, that damage will impact the ability of many more labs to continue their research than just those that were hit the hardest.

Ast works in the Department of Biomolecular Sciences. She started her lab a little over two years ago, researching how the human body uses iron and the ways an excess or lack of iron causes diseases.

“The lab is located in a building pretty far away from where the impact was,” she said. “We did sustain some damage to the building. Some parts of the ceiling collapsed, and windows were shattered. But overall, that’s very minor in light of what other labs are going through.”

Ast also explained that the Weizmann community has been affected by the incident beyond people’s work.

“Many of us live in Weizmann housing either on campus or off campus,” she said. “Especially facilities on campus took a serious hit, and people were forced to leave their homes. The basic sense of safety of many has been affected.”

Research center with international acclaim

Like other universities in Israel, Weizmann has ties with the military industry. In June 2023, for example, the Weizmann AMOTech club – an initiative led by students and researchers to connect physicists in Academia and Industry – hosted an event on R&D in the defense industry in Israel.

In October 2024, Weizmann announced a collaboration with military technology company Elbit to develop “groundbreaking bio-inspired materials for defense applications.”

Just two days after the strike, the prestigious European Research Council announced the 281 recipients of its Advanced Grants, totaling €721 million. Of the 12 grants awarded to Israeli universities, six went to the Weizmann Institute. In the Life Sciences category, Weizmann secured four of the 81 grants awarded by the ERC.

According to Prof. Oren Schuldiner, at least 15 labs destroyed by the missile were supported by ERC grants, including his own. “We will need €1.5-2 million to rebuild my lab,” he told The Times of Israel over the phone. Yet, Schuldiner said that it is not the money that concerns him the most.

Schuldiner’s research focuses on developmental neurobiology, aiming to uncover the processes the brain undergoes during development and how disruptions in these processes can lead to conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, ADHD, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

“My lab investigates these mechanisms at the basic molecular level, using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism,” he explained. “Over the years, we’ve developed a range of tools that allow us to visualize individual neurons within the intact brain of the fly.”

According to Schuldiner, fruit flies are particularly well-suited for these studies because a developmental process that takes 20 years in the human brain occurs within a few days during Drosophila’s metamorphosis from larva to adult.

“Our most dramatic loss is the hundreds of transgenic flies that we had created over the years,” Schuldiner said.

The fly community is very generous and very collaborative

 

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), the researcher appealed to his colleagues, asking those who had received something from the lab in the past to keep it safe. “The fly community is very generous and very collaborative,” he said. “We often send flies to each other.”

The work of a lifetime vanished

Some 10 people work in Schuldiner’s lab. The researcher, who was in Germany at the time of the attack and is stuck there, says it’s been shocking to see the work of a lifetime vanish.

“It is heartbreaking, there is no other word for it,” he said. “We are talking about 17 years of my career, all that we had built as a group, completely vaporized.”

We are talking about 17 years of my career, all that we had built as a group, completely vaporized

 

The professor said that since the strike, he spends most of his days talking to the students working at his lab. “Their careers have been dramatically impacted,” he said. “We are trying to think about how to help each of them individually and also what we can do as a group to rebuild what we have lost.”

Researcher Ast said that Weizmann is striving to ensure that everyone feels supported, with a particular focus on its international population. “For very understandable reasons, the size of the international community on campus got smaller after October 7, but a lot of them came back because Weizmann really does cutting-edge science,” she said.

“Weizmann is very deeply aware of how difficult it is to be an international student anywhere in the world, but even more challenging in Israel under these conditions,” she said. “The institute is trying to make sure that this international population feels they are protected and prioritized.”

What’s next?

For some labs, the process of rebuilding could take years. “We had a confocal microscope that cost about half a million euros,” said Schuldiner. “These are microscopes that are manufactured in Germany, and in normal times, it takes three or four months for one to be built in a lab here. In the current situation, who knows how much more it will take?”

All the scientists emphasized that the silver lining in the attack has been the outpouring of solidarity they received from colleagues in Israel and abroad.

“Since Sunday morning, I have received hundreds of emails and WhatsApp messages from all over the world, with people expressing how devastated they are for what I went through and offering to help in any way they can,” said Tzahor.

“This has been the most heartwarming part of what happened,” Schuldiner echoed. “There have been people offering to host the lab in Israel and abroad. Another lab said they could remake some plasmids [DNA molecules] for us, and the company that usually prepares flies for us in California offered to do so for free.”

“It is too early for me to ask for something specific, but this response definitely helps,” he added.

Rossella Tercatin