Haim Ernst Wertheimer

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Haim Ernst Wertheimer (August 24, 1893 – March 23, 1978) was an Israeli biochemist known as the father of fat metabolism. He was born in Bühl, Germany, and began studying medicine in 1912 in Berlin, Bonn, and Kiel. World War I interrupted his studies, and he served as a medical officer in Flanders and Italy, earning the Iron Cross, second class. After the war, he finished medical school at Heidelberg University. In 1920–21 he worked as a doctor at Berlin’s municipal orphanage, then at the Institute for Physiology, University of Halle. With the rise of the Nazis, he lost his job and moved to Mandate Palestine in 1934. There he became temporary director of the Laboratory of Chemistry at Hadassah Medical School, part of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later worked at Hadassah Medical Center, becoming its dean in the 1950s. Wertheimer received the Israel Prize in 1956 and the Solomon Bublick Award in 1964.