Ruth Arnon

Ruth Arnon, nee Rosenberg, ( born June 1, 1933, Tel Aviv) is an Israeli immunologist.

Her father, an electrical engineer, was born in Brest- Litovsk, but in 1904 moved with his family to Palestine. Arnon studied chemistry at the Hebrew University with a master's degree in 1955. Afterwards she was two years an officer in the Israeli army. Then she went to the group of Ephraim Katzir (then Katchalski ) at the Weizmann Institute, where she received her doctorate at Michael Sela in 1957, with whom she later worked together a lot. She was Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute and was its vice- president from 1988 to 1993. She was also from 1975 to 1978 Director, Division of Chemical Immunology at the Weizmann Institute, 1984-1994 Director of the MacArthur Center for Parasitology, 1985-1988 Dean of the Faculty of Biology and 1995-1997 Vice President of the Institute of International Relations.

She was a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, at the University of Washington, UCLA, the Institut Pasteur and the Institut Curie in Paris, at the National Institutes of Health ( Fogarty Scholar ) at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne and at Imperial Canter research Fund in London.

With Sela she pioneered in the development of synthetic antigens. With Devorah Teitelbaum and Sela she also discovered the therapeutic effect of synthetic antigens in an animal disease that has been studied as a model for multiple sclerosis. From these studies, the development of the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone, on the Arnon was much involved arose.

In 1998 she was awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine with Michael Sela. She was awarded the Israel Prize (2001), the Robert Koch Prize (1979 ), the Jimenez - Diaz Prize ( 1986) and the Rothschild Prize ( 1998). She is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences ( 1990), the Vice President, she was its president from 2004 to 2010 and it was 2010. 2001 to 2010 she was a consultant of the Israeli president. Arnon is a Knight of the Legion of Honor in France. 2011 gave the University of Tel Aviv her an honorary doctorate.

She is married to the engineer Uriel Arnon and has two children.