Obituary for Arren Bar-Even
With great sadness, we have to announce the sudden, untimely and tragic death of our colleague Arren Bar-Even who passed away last week at the age of 40.
Tobias Erb, Director at the MPI for Terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg
I met Arren the first time in 2010, a young scientist of my age, curious about the imperfection of
evolution, asking whether the human mind would be able to design alternative biological solutions
that would outcompete those serendipitous inventions made by Nature. His thought-provoking
questions echoed my own thinking and I felt immediately connected.
This was the beginning of an intellectually and experimentally rich collaboration, as well as a
wonderful friendship. Ever since, we were dreaming of completely re-drafting the central metabolic
network of cells to create a new, synthetic metabolism that would allow us to capture CO2 more
efficiently, thus providing a solution to one of the biggest challenges of humankind.
Arren became one of the most creative and brilliant minds in the emerging field of synthetic biology.
His pathway designs started off as a purely theoretical exercise, rigorously following chemical and
mathematical logic, and transpired into synthetic, new-to-nature metabolic networks that came alive
in his lab. For some of his designs, our lab in Marburg set out to develop the necessary enzymes.
Sometimes very skeptical – and only after his very insisting advice in a very long phone call – to be
proven wrong every single time. We just had begun to virtually see the first, beautiful and exciting
flowers of our work, when he suddenly and unexpectedly passed away.
If one considered Nature a great designer, Arren’s design was outstanding. Not only were his synthetic
pathways more efficient than natural metabolism, they were also both elegant and aesthetically
beautiful, a powerful demonstration of human creativity. Arren once said, “metabolism is the kernel
of life”. Even though his phone calls will be painfully missed, it provides me with some comfort that
Arren’s synthetic pathways will be alive and continue to evolve, providing an everlasting source of
inspiration for the next generation of scientists at the dawn of synthetic biology.