A missile struck this world-class institute in Israel, and the world shrugged.
This wasn’t just an attack on Israel. It was an attack on human progress.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Francisco J. Bernal, a British writer.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
By 8:30 a.m., the fires had been contained.
Hoses were still coiled on the pavement. Glass crunched underfoot. In the skeletal ruins of the Weizmann Institute’s life sciences building, a man stepped over twisted beams in search of a single freezer.
Professor Eldad Tzahor, a specialist in heart tissue regeneration, had worked in this lab for 22 years. Now it was scorched. The lights were gone. The smell of burned metal clung to the walls. But the freezer, stainless steel and frost-sealed, stood upright.
Inside were thousands of samples: tissue grown from animal hearts, gene-edited lines from patients with cardiomyopathy, and irreplaceable vials linked to clinical trials. They had to act fast. The backup generators had failed in the night. The samples, stored at minus-80 degrees celsius, were thawing by the minute.
He returned with help, opened the freezer, and began moving the samples to another building. The cold air escaped like a ghost.
“We rushed what we could,” said Tzahor, later. “By then, they were already warm. I don’t know if they’ll be usable. But we did something.”1
What he didn’t say, and didn’t need to, was that some things are worth saving even when they may already be lost.
The Weizmann Institute of Science was never just a university. Founded in 1934 by Chaim Weizmann, a chemist and Israel’s first president, it was built to be a sanctuary for inquiry. Its motto was simple: science for the benefit of humanity.
Here, time moved differently. Experiments took years. Theories matured like wine. Its grounds, tree-lined and sun-washed, were filled with over 250 research groups exploring how life begins, how diseases spread, and how the mind remembers.
Its breakthroughs were not ornamental. Weizmann scientists helped develop multiple sclerosis treatments. They created foundational components of CAR-T cancer therapy. They redefined how we understand diet, ageing, and the microbiome.2
The world took notice. Weizmann consistently ranked among the top-10 research institutions globally. Its researchers held more European Research Council grants per capita than any European university.3 On any given afternoon, one could hear French, Mandarin, Arabic, and Amharic drifting through the labs.
It was not just an Israeli asset; it was a planetary one.
On June 15, 2025, during a barrage of missile fire from Iran, one missile landed on Rehovot (the Israeli city where the Weizmann Institute is located).
It was not a near miss; it was a direct hit. The main life sciences building collapsed inward. Fire tore through concrete and aluminium. Freezers shorted out. Cell cultures boiled. Two buildings were destroyed completely. Dozens more were damaged.
In total, 45 labs were knocked out of commission. The Institute later estimated that 90 percent of its buildings had sustained some form of structural harm.
There were no deaths. But among scientists, there was a different kind of mourning.
Professor Oren Schuldiner, a developmental neurobiologist, lost 17 years of work. His lab had been breeding transgenic fruit flies to study how brain circuits form. The models, some of them unique in the world, were gone.
“Hundreds of lines, just vaporized,” he said. “We’ve sent flies to labs around the world. I’m now begging them to send some back.”4
In another lab, a postdoctoral researcher broke down when she discovered that the cell lines from her deceased friend, a cancer patient who had donated tissue in the hope others might live, had all been incinerated.
“We had samples from every one of his metastases,” she said. “From his liver, spine, brain. We were learning from him. Now it’s all ash.”5
The Institute’s central imaging core, used by dozens of labs, was destroyed. So were millions of dollars’ worth of microscopes, incubators, reagents, and datasets.
“What burned wasn’t just equipment,” said professor Sarel Fleishman. “It was the stuff of futures. The things that don't get rebuilt with insurance.”
The Associated Press called it “a chilling message to Israel’s scientific elite.” Reuters noted the destruction but focused mostly on political context. The New York Times mentioned it once, calling it a research centre that had sustained severe damage. No elaboration, no follow-up.
Euronews framed the Institute as dual-use, hinting at defence links. The implication subtly reinforced the Iranian narrative and was left unchallenged. Iranian state media called it a victory, a blow to Zionist infrastructure with ties to intelligence operations.
Just months earlier, the BBC had covered Weizmann’s synthetic embryo breakthrough with awe, but in the days after the missile strike, it offered no headline, no footage, no sustained coverage.
When Notre-Dame caught fire, heads of state flew to Paris. When Ukrainian universities were shelled, the scientific world raised its voice. But when a missile incinerated one of the planet’s foremost cancer and neuroscience labs, the silence was striking.
The buildings were civilian. The science was open-access. The contributions were global. And yet, no United Nations condemnation came. No emergency session was called. No Nobel laureate took to the podium.
The message to many Israeli scientists became clear: You are not sacred. You are not even symbolic.
In the decade before the attack, Weizmann scientists had changed the arc of global medicine. Professor Zelig Eshhar’s research on reprogramming T-cells gave birth to CAR-T therapy, now saving lives from leukaemia around the world. Just days before the strike, professors Shlush and Tanay had announced a method to detect leukaemia from a simple blood test, years before symptoms would appear.
In 2015, professors Elinav and Segal overturned decades of nutritional science. They showed that each person metabolises food differently. Personalised diets became the new standard.
Professor Jacob Hanna grew mouse embryos from stem cells, then created human embryo models without sperm or egg. The ethical implications were enormous, but so were the clinical ones: a better understanding of miscarriage, organogenesis, and genetic disease.
Schuldiner’s fruit flies revealed how memory forms, and how it fades. His flies are gone, but some may yet survive in freezers abroad.
These were not Israeli achievements. They were human ones. And they were silenced mid-sentence.
Within 72 hours, the messages began arriving.
Labs in California offered DNA constructs. A biobank in Berlin sent replacements. A cancer lab in Switzerland offered to host Weizmann postdocs. “We don’t have much,” one wrote, “but we have a centrifuge and space.”
A company that once bought fruit fly strains from Schuldiner offered to re-breed them for free. Students cried reading the emails. For many, it was the first moment they felt less alone.
The European Research Council assured affected grantees that their projects would not be cancelled. Fellowships were paused, not revoked. It was not justice, but it was solidarity. And sometimes, that is enough to begin again.
You can kill a man. You can level a building. But you cannot erase an idea once it is spoken. The test for leukemia survived. The embryo protocols were backed up. The mice will be bred again.
But that is not the same as what was lost.
What was lost were the years, the hesitations, the dead ends that led to insight, the patient who donated tissue with the hope that his suffering would mean something, the graduate student who finally got a result on the eve of destruction.
There is no backup for grief.
The Weizmann Institute will rise again, but it will not be the same. Something was severed. Not a wing. Not a dataset. Something moral.
What was lost was not just Israeli science. What was lost was a piece of our shared future.
“From heart tissue to DNA samples, Weizmann scientists mourn work vaporized in Iran attack.” Times of Israel.
“Weizmann Institute scientist Zelig Eshhar receives 2022 CARF award.” American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science.
“ERC Advanced Grants 2025: Weizmann leads Israeli institutions damaged in missile strike.” Science|Business.
“From heart tissue to DNA samples, Weizmann scientists mourn work vaporized in Iran attack.” Times of Israel.
הטיל מחק מחקרים שנועדו לסייע לכל העולם: ההרס מהפגיעה במכון ויצמן. Kan News.
 | A guest post by
|
This was outrageous and heartbreaking! This has set the world back years in curing and solving dreadful diseases. Israel has always been at the forefront of pioneering research. For the scientists, this must be heartbreaking!
Thank you for raising this global tragedy to a slightly higher level of awareness. Once again it is incredible how little attention this tragic situation received in legacy media. How sad that beyond the small family of scientists who jumped to help, the world has not grasped that the well-being of humanity has been seriously set back by Iran’s desperate act of hatred and destruction.