During WWII, when even neutral Switzerland experienced food shortages the vegetable garden and the animals they raised proved essential toward keeping the immediate as well as the extended family fed.

[1] Danon had been exiled by the British from Palestine for his Irgun activities, and Krim saw him as a “dashing and heroic figure” dedicated to a noble cause that had used terrorism to achieve its ends, she said in an interview with the late Donald Neff, a former Time Magazine Correspondent.

They arranged for those munitions to be shipped to the Zionist resistance group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which at the time was fighting against British rule in Palestine prior to the 1948 creation of Israel.

There David enlisted as a medical officer with the nascent Israeli Air Force and Mathilde began research work at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.

At the Weizmann Institute, Mathilde worked in the laboratory of Dr. Leo Sachs on the team that developed the amniocentesis technique by which it became possible to determine the gender of a fetus in utero.

Being a single young woman, she had been asked by Institute administrators to be Arthur Krim’s date at a welcome dinner to be held for the Board members, most of whom were there accompanied by their spouses.

However, she was persuaded to attend the dinner and, to her great but pleasant surprise, Mathilde soon found herself fascinated and impressed by Arthur Krim, primarily due to his charm, his kind heart, his own interest in science, and his stellar intellect.

From 1953 to 1959, she pursued research in cytogenetics and cancer-causing viruses at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where she was a member of the team that first developed a method for the prenatal determination of sex.

Arthur B. Krim was a New York attorney, head of United Artists, later founder of Orion Pictures, active member of the Democratic Party, and advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.

Nelson Mandela, Bishop and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu, and freedom fighter Joshua Nkomo of Zimbabwe, were among their personal friends.

Soon after the first cases of what would later be called AIDS were reported in 1981, Krim recognized that this new disease raised grave scientific and medical questions and that it might have important socio-political consequences.

In August 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, in recognition of her "extraordinary compassion and commitment".