Meir Lahav

Meir Lahav was born on June 27, 1936, in Sofia, Bulgaria, to Liza and Albert Lahav, a Jewish family.[2] His early childhood was shadowed by the Nazi persecution of European Jews. During World War II, his father was placed in a labor camp, and in 1943 Lahav, his mother, and his sister were sent from Sofia to another Bulgarian town, where they awaited deportation to Auschwitz.[1] The Soviet invasion of Bulgaria in 1944 interrupted those plans and allowed the family to return to Sofia.[1]

The family immigrated to Israel in 1948, the year the State of Israel was established.[2] Lahav completed elementary school in Kfar Ata and attended the School for Workers' Children in Kiryat Haim, where he followed the scientific track.[2] Arriving in Israel knowing only Bulgarian and French — not Hebrew or English, the principal languages he encountered — he found science and mathematics the easiest subjects to follow.[1] He has recalled the formative influence of a high school chemistry teacher who encouraged students to pursue independent learning: "I remember that I was greatly influenced by the chemistry teacher who encouraged us, the students, to go to the library, read, gather knowledge and broaden our horizons. Learning was based on curiosity and interest and not on memorization."[2]

In 1956, Lahav enlisted in the Golani Brigade and fought in the Sinai Campaign; he later participated in additional wars as a reservist.[2]

Lahav earned a master's degree in chemistry with distinction from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1962, and a doctorate in chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot in 1967, conducting his doctoral research in solid-state photochemistry under Prof. Gerhard Schmidt.[2] He then held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University from 1969 to 1971, focusing on free radicals and organic physical chemistry.[2]

Returning to the Weizmann Institute, Lahav progressed through the ranks: scientist (1971–1974), senior researcher (1975–1977), associate professor (1978–1982), and full professor (1982–2004), becoming professor emeritus in 2004.[2] He held the Margaret Thatcher Chair from 1984 until his retirement, chaired the Feinberg Graduate School's Chemistry Sciences Teaching Committee from 1979 to 1983, and served as deputy chair of the institute's Scientific Council from 1984 to 1986.[2] He founded and headed the Department of Materials and Surface Science from 1991 to 2000, and founded and headed the Schmidt–Minerva Center for Molecular Interactions from 1995 to 2001.[2]

Beyond the Weizmann Institute, Lahav held visiting professorships at Cambridge (1982), Harvard (1984), the universities of Frankfurt and Mainz (1992), Strasbourg (1992 and 2004), and the University of Tokyo (2005 and 2008).[2] He served as scientific adviser to DuPont from 1984 to 1994 and became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 1998.[2]

Working primarily with Leslie Leiserowitz, Lahav built a research program centered on stereochemistry and crystallography. Beginning in the 1970s, they conducted experiments involving the addition of auxiliary molecules to chiral molecules, allowing the researchers to investigate how molecules were arranged within crystals.[1] Their work showed that adding a very small quantity of a chiral substance could cause an entire collection of molecules to crystallize into a uniform chiral structure, establishing a direct link between the chirality of individual molecules and the symmetry of the resulting crystal.[2]

Lahav and Leiserowitz used X-ray and neutron diffraction to study photochemical reactions inside single crystals and developed an approach for engineering crystal morphology into desired forms with defined structures and chemical properties.[2] A key theoretical contribution was the discovery of the "Rule of Reversal," which addressed the relationship between a molecule's absolute chiral structure and the symmetric structure of the crystal formed from those molecules — a discovery described as changing scientific understanding of crystal symmetry and the properties of multi-component crystals.[2]

The pair also developed methods for separating substances according to orientation, modifying crystal structures, and producing different crystal structures from the same substance — the phenomenon known as polymorphism — methods that became foundational to the pharmaceutical industry.[2] Together with Danish collaborators, they developed a crystallographic method using synchrotron X-rays to determine the structures of small molecular clusters formed on the surface of water, demonstrating that such clusters can serve as nuclei for the crystallization of solid material and enabling crystal formation to be studied and controlled from the earliest stage of nucleation.[2] This work contributed to research on cholesterol crystals in phospholipids, crystal formation in malaria, and the freezing of ice from highly supercooled water.[2]

Their research also addressed questions arising from Louis Pasteur's 1848 observation that sodium ammonium tartrate crystals could be enantiomorphous — occurring in two mirror-image forms — and found applications ranging from the formation of ice crystals to the way the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium uses crystals to remove toxins.[1] In later years, Lahav continued investigating homochirality in the living world and, together with Prof. Igor Lubomirsky, studied defects in polar organic crystals and their role in determining the freezing temperature of ice.[2]

Lahav's scientific legacy is closely associated with his collaboration with Leslie Leiserowitz. Their work connected molecular chirality with crystal symmetry, advanced methods for controlling crystal morphology and polymorphism, and produced techniques described in the Israel Prize record as foundational to the pharmaceutical industry.[2] Their research also extended the study of crystal nucleation to cholesterol crystals in phospholipids, crystals formed in malaria, and the freezing of highly supercooled water.[2] Over the course of his career, Lahav published more than 250 scientific articles in international journals, including 17 in Science and Nature.[2]

Lahav received a series of distinguished awards across his career.[2] Early recognition came with the Kandy Prize in 1965 and the A. D. Bergmann Prize in 1974.[2] Later honors included the Kolthoff Prize in 1984 and the Israel Chemical Society Prize in 1999.[2] He was named Percy Professor of Honor at the University of Minnesota in 1999.[2]

Shared with Leiserowitz, the 2002 Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized their crystallographic research.[1] The Chirality Medal of the Italian Chemical Society followed in 2006, and the Gold Medal of the Israel Chemical Society in 2009.[2] In 2021, Lahav and Leiserowitz received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry.[1]

Lahav and Leiserowitz jointly received the Israel Prize for chemistry and physics research for 2015–2016 (Hebrew year תשע״ו).[2] The citation recognized their pioneering research into basic stereochemical processes through crystallography — including the formation of crystals and ordered chiral structures through molecularly induced self-organization — and described their findings as providing a scientific basis for understanding processes in nature and a foundation for future medicine development.[2]