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Leo Sachs was a German-born Israeli molecular biologist and cancer researcher. Born in Leipzig, he emigrated to England in 1933, and to Israel in 1952. There he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Prof. Leo Sachs moved to England with his family in 1933 following Hitler’s rise to power. In 1952 he received a B.Sc. from the University of Wales in Bangor. His original dream was to help establish a kibbutz in Palestine, and he even spent two years as a farm laborer, milking cows. But the doors to Palestine were virtually closed by the British, so Sachs began studying agricultural botany at the University of Wales, became fascinated along the way by genetics and development, and ended up completing a Ph.D. in genetics in 1951 at Cambridge University.
Upon moving to Israel, he began to contribute to the fledgling country in the way he knew best – as a geneticist at the Weizmann Institute. Because there were no animal studies yet at the Institute, Sachs started working on a theory that human amniotic fluid, which bathes the baby in the womb, contains fetal cells that provide information about the fetus. His research proved him right, showing that these cells can be used to determine the baby's gender and other important genetic properties. Sachs's research formed the basis for amniocentesis, the widely used prenatal diagnosis of human diseases.
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