Haim Aviv

Haim Aviv was born in 1940 in Romania

Haim Aviv was born Haim Greenspan in Arad, Romania, in 1940. He moved to Israel as a child and grew up in Rehovot, where he lived for the rest of his life.

He earned a master's degree at the Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University. He then moved to molecular biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science and finished a doctorate on protein synthesis in 1970.

At the US National Institutes of Health he developed a method to purify messenger RNA and took part in work that first made it possible to synthesize complementary DNA. He returned to the Weizmann Institute in 1973 as a senior scientist. In the late 1970s he engineered a bacterium carrying the gene for bovine growth hormone, a patented method used to raise milk production in cows.

In 1980 he started Biotechnology General. He later founded Diatech and led Pharmos, whose head injury drug did not meet expectations in phase 3 trials, and he left Pharmos in 2007. He also founded Predix in 2000 and chaired the national committee for biotechnology.

In his free time he studied Judaism and Jewish history, especially the Holocaust, and collected old Judaica books. He died on November 13, 2021.