Lives of the First World War

Gideon Mer (1894 - 22 March 1961) was an Israeli scientist whose work was mostly concerned with the eradication of malaria. He was the father of Arna Mer-Khamis and the grandfather of Juliano Mer-Khamis. Gideon Mer was born in Lithuania, He studied medicine in Russia and France. He immigrated to Palestine in 1914. During World War I he was a medical officer in the Jewish Legion, a unit of the British Army, and served at Gallipoli, in Palestine, Syria, and Turkey. After the war he returned to Rosh Pinna, a Jewish settlement in the north of Palestine, and his laboratory there eventually became a research station for the study of the bionomics of mosquitoes and methods of malaria control With the opening of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he joined the Department of Preventive Medicine.