The Weizmann contribution
How the future president of Israel kept Britain fighting in the first world war
If you look through books on world war one, you will find the names of numerous politicians and generals; some famous, some less well known. But there is a good chance you will search in vain for the name Chaim Weizmann.
Weizmann was a reader in biochemistry at the University of Manchester, UK, when war broke out in 1914. He was born in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1874 and studied chemistry in Germany and Switzerland before lecturing in chemistry at the University of Geneva. He emigrated to England in 1904, and six years later became a naturalised British citizen. And his discovery, in 1912, of a way of making acetone from the starch in cereal grains may well have saved his adopted country from defeat.