Daniel Chamovitz

Daniel Chamovitz was born in Pittsburgh, USA, and grew up in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. He studied biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he earned his PhD in genetics through research on the beta-carotene biosynthesis pathway, becoming the first to identify a gene involved in producing this pigment. During his postdoctoral work at Yale University, he discovered the COP9 signalosome, a protein complex initially thought to be a master regulator of plant development; his lab's later work showed it is also essential for animal development and implicated in several human diseases, including cancer.

For years Chamovitz worked at Tel Aviv University, where he chaired the Department of Plant Sciences, founded and directed the interdisciplinary Manna Center Program in Food Security, and served as Dean of the George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences from 2014 to 2018. In January 2019 he became the seventh president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva.

His broader public reputation rests largely on his book "What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses" (2012), translated into more than twenty languages. Drawing on molecular biology, Chamovitz argues that although plants lack a brain or nervous system, they display capacities comparable to the human senses — sensing light, detecting airborne chemicals, responding to touch, reacting to vibration, and even a form of "remembering" past environmental events. The book stirred debate at the intersection of biology, philosophy of mind, and bioethics: can terms like "perception" and "memory" be applied without presupposing consciousness, and where does the boundary lie between complex biological systems and a conscious mind? Chamovitz himself has always spoken cautiously about applying words like "intelligence" or "awareness" to plants, insisting his aim is to open questions rather than project human mental categories onto plant life.