Obituary for Arren Bar-Even

September 29, 2020

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.

Dan S. Tawfik, Department of Biomolecular Sciences, the Weizmann Institute of Science

My very first meeting with Arren, when he just began his PhD with Ron Milo in 2009, had left an
unforgettable impression. As Arren liked to shock those that meet him first, and in a way test if they
are sufficiently clever and openminded to stomach a maverick, an eccentric genius. As his group
members described: you’d admire, love Arren, even though he could rack up your nerves, and
thoroughly so.
This meeting was the beginning of a deep intellectual partnership and a friendship. My interest in
enzymes, and enzyme evolution, and Arren’s interest in metabolic engineering created a fertile
playground that others like Avi Flamholtz and Dan Davidi joined later. There was never a dull moment
in that playground, nor a silent one. Arren’s vigor, boundless energy, and obsession regarding anything
from metabolism to the font he used in writing papers, was infective. My discussions with him became
infamous, as they were conducted over hours and at high decibels. Yet they were thought-provoking,
illuminating, and had a long-lasting effect on my scientific thinking. In the last several years, with Arren
at MPI, I joined his effort of engineering novel photorespiration bypasses – these were Arren’s
creation, and his charisma and leadership also led to their realization.

I cannot find words that will describe the sadness, the feeling of injustice, and the void, that Arren’s
sudden and untimely death had left me with. Arren was due to join our department, and I was so
much looking forward to having him as a colleague and next-door neighbor, to our passionate,
argumentative discussions be they about enzymes or religion. Yet, his scientific legacy and the fond
memories remain with us. Thank you Arren for being Arren, a role no one but Arren would or could
have taken.

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