Nathan Sharon

Nathan Sharon (Hebrew: נתן שרון; November 1925 – 17 June 2011) was an Israeli biochemist. Sharon was born in 1925 in Brest-Litovsk, then part of Poland (now Brest, Belarus). He emigrated to Mandate Palestine with his family in 1934 and settled in Tel Aviv. Concurrent with his high school studies, Sharon joined the Gadna military youth program in 1941, and following his graduation from school, in 1943, he joined the Palmach, serving until 1945. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Sharon served in the Science Corps of the Israel Defense Forces, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he focused his work on the development of gas flame throwers. Sharon studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1950, he graduated and, in 1953, he was awarded a doctorate. In 1954, he joined the faculty of the Department for Biophysics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, headed by professor Ephraim Katzir, where he became a professor in 1968. In 1974, he was appointed head of the department, a position he held intermittently until his retirement in 1990. He also served as dean of the Faculty of Chemistry and Physics and was a visiting professor at Harvard, Oxford universities and the University of California, Berkeley.