Ute Deichmann

Ute Deichmann is a historian of modern life sciences. She is adj. professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and founding director of the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. She is also apl. professor at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on the history and philosophy of informational and structural life sciences from the 19th till the 21st century, analyzing causes of successful approaches and critically reviewing fashionable claims such as epigenetics supporting neo-Lamarckism and relativizing the importance of the genome. She was awarded the 2009 Outstanding Paper Award from the Division of the History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society for her "'Molecular' versus 'Colloidal': Controversies in Biology and Biochemistry, 1900–1940".

She previously conducted seminal works on the impact of Nazi policies on the biological and chemical sciences in Germany, analyzing in detail the impact of the forced emigration of Jewish scientists and the political attitudes and scientific research of the scientists in Germany (Deichmann1996 and 2001). For these books she was awarded the Ladislaus Laszt Award of Ben-Gurion University, and the Gmelin Beilstein-Medaille of the German Chemical Society (GDCh), respectively. She has also studied the beginnings of the science collaboration between Israel and Germany.