Two molds, two wars: What Israel’s shelters are quietly protecting
In 1942, with Soviet field hospitals losing wounded soldiers to infection faster than to shrapnel, a microbiologist named Zinaida Yermolyeva and her assistant Tamara Balezina spent months screening mold samples from damp, disused corners of wartime Moscow, including its bomb shelters, hunting for something that could do for the Red Army what Britain’s penicillin was already doing for the Allies. They found a workable strain, later named Krustozin, credited with saving a great many soldiers who would otherwise have died of sepsis. Soviet propaganda later inflated this into a claim that Yermolyeva had invented penicillin itself, a myth Russian officials still occasionally repeat and that independent fact checkers have rightly corrected: Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in London in 1928, and Florey’s Oxford team turned it into a usable drug before Yermolyeva began her own work. What she and Balezina actually did was independently find a Soviet strain in the unglamorous, overlooked spaces a besieged city still had to offer.
I think about that this year, watching footage from Israeli bomb shelters. A shelter beneath a Jaffa apartment block doubling as a kindergarten by day and a refuge by night. A packed safe room in Jerusalem where a mother turns an air raid siren into a song to keep her toddler calm. These spaces have become, almost by accident, sites of real adaptation: camaraderie, humor, improvised routine, the sort of resilience outsiders rarely anticipate. It is easy, and not wrong, to read this as a story about Israeli social cohesion. But it is also a story about infrastructure and foresight, about which forms of shelter a society builds before the missiles arrive, and which it does not.
Israel has its own version of the mold story, and it did not go well for everyone. When Iranian missiles struck the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot in June last year, during what became known as the Twelve-Day War, around forty five laboratories across the campus were damaged or destroyed. Professor Eldad Tzahor’s cardiac regeneration lab, holding years of heart tissue, DNA and RNA collections and engineered viruses, was wiped out entirely. Professor Oren Schuldiner’s neuroscience lab lost more than two thousand carefully bred transgenic fly lines built up over years. “The lab is gone. There’s nothing to save,” he said afterwards. Cancer researcher Dr Leeat Yankielowicz-Keren lost five years of tumor samples drawn from patients in Israel, the United States, France and Switzerland. But her team’s written data survived, stored separately from the physical samples. That single detail is the whole argument of this piece in miniature: the same strike that destroyed one kind of scientific record left another, less visible kind, intact.
The clearest illustration came from biologist Jacob Hanna, who was abroad when the missiles hit. After October 2023, unconvinced the fighting would stay contained, he had quietly prepared backup liquid nitrogen tanks in the basement of one of his buildings. When the strike came, his students used those tanks to save hundreds of frozen mouse and human cell lines that would otherwise have been lost with everything around them. Colleagues without that preparation described the aftermath in blunter terms: heartbreaking, and largely unrecoverable.
Britain’s own penicillin team, under different pressure two years before Yermolyeva, reached the same conclusion from the opposite direction. In 1940, with a German invasion of England looking imminent, Florey’s Oxford colleague Norman Heatley began rubbing the living spores of Penicillium into the linings of his coat, a practice he maintained whenever the knowledge was at risk, so it could survive even if the building did not. Three wars, three answers: Heatley hedged before the shelter was needed, Yermolyeva found what she needed only because a shelter existed, and Hanna hedged and was proved right within his own lifetime. All three understood that scientific capital is not the building it sits in but the strain, the sample, the dataset, and unless that knowledge exists in more than one place, a single strike can erase decades of work as if it had never happened. Florey later became Chancellor of the Australian National University, an institution that has since built serious biosecurity and pathogen archiving capability. That is not an accident.
Israel is not naive about the physical half of this equation. At Sheba Medical Center, staff moved the hospital’s entire critical care infrastructure underground in under forty eight hours once the missiles started falling. As the vice president who oversaw it later put it, decades of research data, clinical studies and patient materials are now housed underground specifically to preserve irreplaceable medical knowledge for future generations, not just to protect the people delivering care. One account of Weizmann’s own recovery, less widely corroborated than the Sheba reporting, describes the institute going further still, hardening facilities and moving irreplaceable samples underground ahead of the current war. Either way, neither hospital nor university should remain the exception that one cautious biologist and two institutions burned once happened to arrive at on their own. Every Israeli institution holding irreplaceable biological or clinical data should treat duplication as a standing protocol rather than an improvisation made after the fact: routine mirroring of sample archives to secure sites abroad, formal data sharing arrangements with allied universities so no single strike becomes a scientific extinction event, and the same continuity planning already applied to the power grid and the water supply extended to research collections. None of this requires new doctrine, only what Heatley understood in 1940, Yermolyeva discovered in 1942, and Hanna quietly prepared for after 2023: that under fire, the difference between losing knowledge and merely losing a building is usually decided calmly, in advance, by people who assumed the worst might happen anyway.
Tzahor’s cardiac lab did not have that insurance. Hanna’s cell lines did. Israel, and every country now living with the daily possibility of missile fire, already has the evidence, from its own campuses, of which choice is worth making before the next siren sounds.
A note of thanks to my great colleague at SP Jain School of Global Management, Dr Nicolas Hamelin, founder and director of the Neuroscience Lab at our Sydney campus, a venture he has said was inspired by his Russian aunt, Zinaida Yermolyeva, the scientist at the heart of this piece. Yermolyeva herself was born into an Orthodox Christian family of Don Cossack origin, not a Jewish one, though she married into one: her husband, the microbiologist Lev Zilber, was the brother of the novelist Veniamin Kaverin, born Veniamin Zilber.