27-10-2014

 

Visitors to a recent Tel Aviv art exhibit found themselves in an interactive “lab” in which three containers held the “raw materials of life” in three primary colors: red, green and blue. The hand pumps on the containers led, through hoses, to a covered, steaming pot, in which the primitive “soup of life” simmered.

 

That lofty, but oh-so-human, ambition – to create life out of inanimate matter – is at the heart of this installation, recently exhibited in the Midrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv. The Soup of Life – the result of collaboration between former Weizmann Institute research student Dr. Omer Markovitch and artist/poet Eran Hadas – was included in the group exhibition HeLa – Forms of Human Existence, curated by Daniel Landau and Udi Edelman.    

 

The process bubbling away inside the pot was projected onto a wall above. When one worked the different pump handles, colored “molecules” entered the frame, chasing one another and swirling around the space, until they began to coalesce, forming complex, multicolored spheres. At some point, the spheres split apart into daughter spheres – the “first generation” – and these grew and split in turn, leading to an entire lineage of spheres. This process – a sort of evolution of the spheres – could be controlled by regulating the flow of the three colors into the soup pot.

 

Though Earth’s first living cells were not likely to have been so colorful, the process portrayed in the installation is largely based on a theory of the origin of life that has been developed over the course of many years in the group of Prof. Doron Lancet of the Weizmann Institute’s Molecular Genetics Department, according to which life arose through the evolution of fat-like molecules. Markovitch, who is currently conducting postdoctoral research at Newcastle University in the UK, intends to continue working on avenues of research that arise from this theory.  

 

The idea of an installation based on this theory had resonated with Hadas, whose work primarily deals with the borderlines between technology and poetry. The installation theme resonated, in turn, with the lofty aim of the exhibit: to probe the fact of human existence and the concept of “humanity” – a concept that is changing with new technologies that are redefining the interface between human and machine. Within this context, the low-tech design of The Soup of Life installation was meant to create a user-friendly setup that would distance itself from the sterile, alienating image of stereotypical futuristic, science-based works. This choice is a subtle wink to the viewer – a hint that the possibility of creating life from inanimate matter is really an intellectual exercise, one that is not truly dependent on technological progress.

 

 

 

This is the first ever biography of Ernst David Bergmann: It is the extraordinary story of an extraordinary man. Born in 1903 in Germany, the eldest child of a rabbi, Bergmann became the scientific director of the Daniel Sieff Research Institute (the precursor of the Weizmann Institute). Bergmann was known for his unbounded enthusiasm, especially when presented with an impossible challenge. On one occasion, Dr. Chaim Weizmann even expressed doubt as to whether he could fully rely on Bergmann’s judgment in certain practical matters outside of science. The reason for the doubt, Weizmann explained in a letter to a friend, was that Bergmann was such “an incorrigible optimist.”

Another prominent characteristic of Bergmann’s was his “almost inexhaustible energy and his propensity for 18-hour work days,” write the authors of Scientist in the Service of Israel: The Life and Times of Ernst David Bergmann (1903-1975), recently published by the Hebrew University Magnes Press. Even such an epic event as the proclamation of the establishment of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948, didn’t divert Bergmann’s attention from work for very long. That day, all the employees of the Sieff Institute gathered in the physics lab to listen to the proclamation on the radio. “We listened to the ‘Declaration of Independence’ and everybody went to work, furiously, passionately,” Bergmann reported in a letter to Chaim and Vera Weizmann. But a different account of what happened after the broadcast was given by Joseph Jaffe, then a young physicist at the Institute, in his memoirs: “Our gang dispersed immediately, everyone anxious to join friends and families and get down to serious celebrations.”

 

The authors of the book cite the discrepancy between the two versions as an example of “vintage Bergmann.” He apparently had a tendency to project his own level of commitment onto everyone: “Though there is little doubt that Bergmann’s version accurately represents his own behavior (indeed he would soon move into one of the guest apartments above the Clubhouse so that he could work at the Institute 24/7), one strongly suspects that Jaffe’s account is more accurate when it came to the behavior of others.”
 

 

 

In 1924, after studying at the University of Berlin for just under four years, Bergmann earned his doctorate in organic chemistry, summa cum laude, producing a thesis on “The Addition of Sodium to Carbon-Carbon Double Bonds.” Four years later, at the age of 25, on the basis of studies he had performed in stereochemistry, he was appointed Lecturer at the University and chief assistant to his former thesis adviser Prof. Wilhelm Schlenk. Bergmann was exceptionally prolific: Between 1928 and 1933, he published more than 72 papers and notes dealing with an incredible range of topics. These ranged from polymerization mechanisms to the isomerization and reactivity of unsaturated hydrocarbons, Grignard reactions, molecular rearrangements and the then relatively new technique of dipole-moment measurement for the purpose of structure determination.