Eshel Ben-Jacob (full name Eshel Refael Ben-Jacob Breslav;[2] Hebrew: אשל רפאל בן-יעקב 13 April 1952 – 5 June 2015), was a theoretical and experimental physicist at Tel Aviv University, holder of the Maguy-Glass Chair in Physics of Complex Systems, and Fellow of the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) at Rice University.
After graduating from high school, he matriculated to study physics and mathematics at Tel Aviv University and was drafted to the Israeli Navy two years later.
degree (1975) in physics from Tel Aviv University, a Certificate in System Analysis (1976) from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), and a M.Sc.
Sophisticated chemical communication allows bacteria to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment, distribute tasks, "learn from experience", make decisions and prepare for the future.11 Ben-Jacob put forward the idea of bacterial social intelligence and his group devised a social IQ score of bacteria as a comparative genomic tool to assess the genome potential of bacteria to conduct successful cooperative and adaptable behaviors, or social behaviors, in complex environments.1 Inspired by Ben-Jacob's observations of how bacteria can spontaneously order their motion during collective swarming, the groups of T. Vicsek and Ben-Jacob devised a simple model able to generate non-equilibrium states that violate the usual physics theorems for equilibrium states.
Using fratricide to fight bacteria: In 2000, Ben-Jacob's group discovered a fascinating phenomenon of competition between two sibling bacteria colonies of the P. dendritiformis when inoculated side by side.1 Recent studies of the phenomenon revealed that the two colonies not only inhibited each other from growing into the territory between them but induced the death of those cells close to the border.1 By employing molecular biology methods combined with the new genome sequencing information and bioinformatics, they discovered a new toxin (sibling lethal factor), which acts selectively only on the same bacterial strain.1 Building upon understanding he gained from research in neuroscience (the inhibition of inhibition principle), Ben-Jacob and his collaborators discovered that the ingenious scheme is composed of a stochastic switch regulated by a timer with adaptable clock rate (that is adjusted by the cell stress) via a special decision-circuit composed of a cascade of inhibitions.
The decision-circuits of the individual bacteria are coupled by exchange of chemical messages between the cells to guarantee collective decision for the group benefit.11 Ben-Jacob's studies in neuroscience are guided by an effort to simplify the complexity searching for principles of information coding, memory and learning.
Together with Irun Cohen from the Weizmann institute of science, Ben-Jacob has established the Immune Development Initiative (IDI),[4] a multi-disciplinary research collaboration including of immunologists, physicists and physicians.