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People In Their Own WordsThe Man Behind the Scientist
and the Scientist Behind the Man

Over the course of his 40-year career at the Technion (and for many years
preceding it), Dr. Marcel Gutman has proven to be not only a first-class scientist
whose research has fundamentally changed the way the world treats fuels and
engines and contributed greatly to the country, but also a man with a big heart
and plenty of soul, who goes out of his way to help anyone and everyone

 B y Assoc. Prof. Leonid Tartakovsky, head of the

Technion Internal Combustion Engines Laboratory (TICEL)

1 This rare opportunity to talk about

Dr. Marcel Gutman, both as a person
and as a scientist, fills me with excitement,
appreciation and endless gratitude. Dr.

Gutman is a classic example of a scientist
and a gentleman. For him, phrases like
“contributing to the country” and “helping
others” are not empty declarations, but the
deepest embodiment of his professional
and personal life as one.
Dr. Gutman immigrated to Israel in 1977
from Romania, where he had worked as an
associate professor at the University of Iasi;
two years later, in 1979, he began working at the
Technion. He dedicated almost 40 years of scientific
activity to the Technion and the Faculty of Mechanical
Engineering, until retiring from his research position at the
TICEL in December 2018.
I ask myself, as I write this, where should I begin? With the powerful
memory of the man, friend and colleague, who welcomed me to the lab
30 years ago as a new immigrant who didn’t know a thing and came
to Israel with nothing? Or with the great scientist who made such an
invaluable contribution to this country and to science as a whole?

Thanks to Dr. Gutman's methods for checking engines, Israel became the
first country in the world where all fuel sold at gas stations, both diesel
and gasoline, contains sediment-reducing additives. Simultaneously, in
the eighties he started pushing for transitioning to methanol fuel, which
is recognized today as the most promising form of renewable energy.

24 | MEgazine | Faculty of Mechanical Engineering