$30,000,000 Will Be Invested in Scientific Work in Israel This Year

Premier Levi Eshkol disclosed today that 90,000,000 pounds ($30,000,000) will be invested in Israeli research and scientific work during the current fiscal year with the Government contributing half of that sum.

He reported on the projected investment in a message to the first session of the annual meeting of the Board of Governors of the Weizmann Institute. The meeting, described as one of the most important in the Institute’s history, was expected to lead to radical reorganization and financial retrenchment. It was reported that the Institute was experiencing problems in meeting its annual $7,000,000 budget. Meir Weisgal, chairman of the Institute executive council, plans to propose a 100,000,000-pound endowment fund.

Prof. Jerome Wiesner, dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty, arrived last night for the meeting. Other leading overseas scientists attending the event include Nobel prize winners Sir Robert Robinson of London, Prof. C. Kondrew of Cambridge and Prof; Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic physicist.

In an address to the first session of the new academic year at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Premier Esnkol urged the students to form nuclei to establish industrial collectives throughout the country. He said such settlements should be the basis for a new form of mixed settlement — agricultural and industrial — which would help solve the problem of population dispersal in Israel. He called this goal “a new challenge not inferior to that faced by our agricultural pioneers in the past” and said such efforts should be aimed at areas where private initiative was not ready to penetrate.