Founded in 1934 by Chaim Weizmann and his first team, among them Benjamin M. Bloch, as the Daniel Sieff Research Institute. Weizmann had offered the post of director to Nobel Prize laureate Fritz Haber, but took over the directorship himself after Haber's death en route to Palestine. Before he became President of the State of Israel in February 1949, Weizmann pursued his research in organic chemistry at its laboratories. The institute was renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science in his honor on November 2, 1949, in agreement with the Sieff family
