As missiles streak across the Middle East the world watches a war unfold. Casualty counts. Leadership losses. Energy markets in freefall. These are the metrics we use to measure the cost of war.
But there is another cost that does not show up on a battlefield map — and we already know what it looks like. During the 12-Day War last June, two Iranian ballistic missiles struck the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel (photo). That attack halted nearly one-fifth of the Institute’s scientific activity. It damaged or destroyed more than 25,000 biological samples across 52 laboratories.
The attack set back years of cancer research, immunotherapy development and global scientific collaboration. Those consequences do not stop at national borders. They ripple outward, delaying therapies, disrupting partnerships and weakening the world’s ability to respond to threats that do not carry passports.
That is the hidden ledger of modern warfare. And as the current conflict progresses, we should be clear-eyed about the human and societal losses accumulating beyond the headlines.
Most picture scientific breakthroughs at the moment of success: a paper published, a vaccine approved, a discovery celebrated. But the work behind those moments is far more fragile. It depends on carefully calibrated instruments, long-running ecological measurements and lab notebooks recording the subtle details that make experiments repeatable. Scientific progress is cumulative. It advances because researchers build patiently on years, sometimes decades, of prior work.
The destruction of scientific research is like setting fire to a library full of one-of-a-kind, original works. It’s not just paper burning — it’s knowledge, memory and ideas vanishing in a puff of smoke. You can rebuild the shelves, but the collection will never be the same.
That is why laboratories are uniquely catastrophic targets. You don’t have to do much to set science back. You need only to rupture the infrastructure that makes discovery reliable and continuous. When a laboratory is forced offline, entire experimental arcs collapse. Long-term studies tracking cancer progression, immune response and climate systems lose continuity. Some data, once interrupted, is permanently compromised. There is no rewind button. There is only the slow, expensive work of starting over.
Modern science does not operate in isolation. It functions as a global network. A cancer drug tested in Boston may rely on molecular insights developed in Israel. When one node in that network is disabled, the human cost ripples outward. A mother in Chicago waiting for an experimental immunotherapy may now wait months longer. Graduate students from five countries, midway through multi-year projects, face abandoning research that represents years of their lives. These are real people whose futures are shaped by whether laboratories on the other side of the world remain standing.
When laboratories are attacked, humanity loses time. Not hours or days — years. Decades, sometimes. In matters of health and climate, lost time costs lives.
In the aftermath of the June strikes, scientists at Weizmann shared bench space, rescued damaged instruments and moved into temporary facilities to preserve critical work. Immunology researchers salvaged years of antibody development. International collaborations pressed forward as best they could despite disruptions.
This determination underscores an important truth: science is resilient. But resilience is not the same as recovery. Some of what was lost in June has not come back. Some never will, and progress lost is a price of war that everyone is forced to pay.
Doneson is the CEO of the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science (ACWIS).