Zelig Eshhar

Zelig Eshhar was born in 1941 in Petah Tikva

Zelig Eshhar was born Zelig Lipka in Petah Tikva on February 25, 1941. He was the eldest son of Yaakov and Sara Lipka, who were born in Poland. He grew up in Rehovot and went to school there.

After school he joined the IDF and a Nahal group at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, where he worked as a beekeeper. When the kibbutz refused his request to study at a university, he left. In the Six-Day War he fought with the Nahal paratroop battalion in the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.

He studied biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a master's degree in biochemistry there. In 1969 he began his doctorate at the Weizmann Institute under Michael Sela and David Givol. He did postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School and learned to make monoclonal antibodies at the Basel Institute for Immunology.

In 1976 he returned to Israel and led a research group at the Weizmann Institute, where he later chaired the Department of Immunology twice. Late in that decade's successor years, he genetically engineered T cells with receptors that let them kill specific cancer cells. This work became the basis of CAR T-cell therapy, and he also directed immunology research at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center.

He received many awards, including the Israel Prize in 2015 and the Dan David Prize in 2021. He died in Tel Yitzhak on July 3, 2025, and was survived by 3 children.