• Home
• Archives
• About
• Links
• Contact

Made in Israel

It’s getting to be that time of year again – where the national holidays come fast and furious. Holocaust Remembrance Day just passed and this week we have Memorial Day and Independence Day right on top of each other as Israel prepares to celebrate its 64th birthday.

While there’s no shortage of subjects to be worried, fearful, skeptical or angry about, I would say that overall, the country’s in pretty good shape. But if the Iranian threat, the political situation, the social welfare crisis and the glut of TV reality shows are getting you down, take a couple minutes and check out this clip that ISRAEL21c’s Nicky Blackburn and Viva Sara Press have put together.

In addition to providing some surprising information about just what Israel has achieved in the past 63 years, it will undoubtedly raise your morale and have you whistling a happy tune going into the coming eventful week. Happy Independence Day Israel! We’re proud of you.

Foto Friday – The Innovators Way

The Innovators Way is a new photo exhibition showcasing 27 researchers whose innovations, developed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, improve quality of life and human welfare worldwide in fields such as health, safety, environment and nutrition.

The exhibition celebrates the work of those researchers whose initiatives have led to commercial products on the market today.

These creative initiatives came about as the result of intensive and wide-ranging scientific research, followed by patent registration, commercialization and finally marketing by Israeli and international companies.

None of this would have been possible without Yissum – the Technology Transfer Company of the Hebrew University. Yissum is solely responsible for the commercialization of innovations and technologies originating at the university. The company was among the first of its kind in the world when it was established in 1964, and is today ranked among the world’s 15 leading companies in this field.

To date, Yissum has registered more than 7,000 patents on more than 2,000 inventions, and has established 72 spin-off companies.

The scientists and innovations documented in the new exhibition include:

Prof. Haim D. Rabinowitch (right) and Prof. Nachum Kedar established the foundations for the introduction of genes for extended fruit shelf-life into standard tomato cultivars, turned cherry tomatoes into a global commodity, and developed the cluster tomatoes. (The original research was conducted jointly with Prof. Yosef Mizrahi of Ben Gurion University and Dr. Ehud Kopeliovitch. The seeds are produced and manufactured by Vilmorin (France), Monsanto (USA), Syngenta (Switzerland) and Bayer (Germany).

Prof. Marta Weinstock-Rosin who developed Exelon, a medicine prescribed for people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. Exelon can slow the progression of the disease in a significant proportion of patients and improve cognitive function in some subjects. Exelon is manufactured by Novartis (Switzerland).

Professor of Chemistry David Avnir, developer of Sol-Gel Technology for the formation of new materials which combine the properties of glasses or ceramics with the properties of organic and biological compounds. Applications of Sol-Gel Technology have been developed in the fields of optics, catalysis, sensing, polymers, biochemistry and pharmacy. Many researchers at the Hebrew University have participated in the various developments. Sol-Gel Technologies, Inc. (Israel) was established to commercialize products based on these newly invented materials, and is active especially in the fields of dermatology and agriculture.

Prof. Alexander Vainstein, the Wolfson Family Professor of Floriculture, who developed the MemoGenetechnology which enables the creation of new traits in plants and the enhancement of agricultural crops through genetic modification. MemoGene is a groundbreaking process for targeted and site-specific plant genetic modification, using highly innovative novel tools for genomic modification. The technology, which was patented jointly by Yissum and Danziger Innovations (Israel), is applicable to all plants.

Prof. Shmuel Peleg has developed technologies upon which two Israeli startups were founded. One technology creates panoramic stereo images from photographs taken by an ordinary camera, which has been commercialized by HumanEyes Technologies (Israel). The second is a technique for video synopsis, which enables hours of video surveillance footage to be viewed in minutes, and which has been commercialized by BriefCam. [Full disclosure: I work for BriefCam and know Prof. Peleg personally. I also thought the photo really captured his spirit.]

The exhibition’s photographer, Nati Shohat, is the founder of Flash 90, a photographic agency that supplies images to newspapers, magazines and other customers in Israel and abroad. Shohat’s news photography and artistic and portrait work have been exhibited in many venues and in publications such as Stern Magazine, Paris Match, Le Monde, Time and others.

Hebrew University has about 1,000 senior faculty members and a student body of approximately 23,000. To date, it has conferred over 120,000 degress. The University has some100 research centers and more than 4,000 research projects. Faculty members and alumni have been awarded 8 Nobel Prizes, 1 Fields Medal, 269 Israel Prizes, 12 Wolf Prizes, 18 EMET Prizes and 41 Rothschild Prizes. Founders include Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Chaim Nachman Bialik.

Montel Williams touts Israel’s medical marijuana

Israel’s reputations as having one of the most advanced medical marijuana programs in the world is getting a big boost these days.

American TV star Montel Williams, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and he has since been an outspoken advocate of medical marijuana to relieve pain caused by the disease, is evidently impressed with our medical usage of the cannabis plant and during a visit to Israel this week, said that he believes the US has something to learn from our policies.

“There are chemicals within that plant,” he told AP, “and some of the leading science on where and how those chemicals work is being done right here in this country,” referring to Israel.

The former host of the popular long-running talk show “The Montel Williams Show” – which rivaled Oprah and Geraldo for popularity – was in Israel meeting with MKs, scientists and physicians about Israel’s medical marijuana practices.

Hundreds of Israelis receive medical marijuana on a regular basis in a government program launched in 1994. I spoke to the program director a couple years ago – Dr. Yehuda Baruch – who said that around 60 more patients applied each month to join the program that enables them to receive free marijuana for their medical problems.
Among the conditions accepted by the program are cancer patients, HIV positive patients, people with Crohn’s Disease or ulcerative colitis, who are being treated by gastroenterologists and MS patients specifically for the spasticity symptoms upon recommendation from an MS center or a neurological specialist. Patients with post stress trauma disorder were being tested with the drug on an experimental basis, Baruch told me.

Itay Goor-Aryeh, the head of the pain management unit at the Sheba Medical Center, told AP that medical marijuana is often more advantageous than other pain-relieving drugs.

Those patients, if they do not get cannabis, they will get morphine-like drugs and other harmful drugs,” said Goor-Aryeh. “I think that in many ways, cannabis is tolerated and is less addictive that morphine-based drugs.”

Williams, who says he uses marijuana daily to alleviate his pain, will surely go back to the US with a different view of Israel.

Mothers and brain function

I’d had a sense that some kind of instinctive mothering call had been installed in my brain upon becoming a mother — and there are many who would agree — but now two Hebrew University researchers have proof, thanks to mice.

According to Dr. Adi Mizrahi and his post-doctoral colleague Dr. Lior Cohen, and based on research conducted on mice, neural changes integrating odors and sounds lie behind a mouse mother’s ability to recognize and respond to distress calls from her pups. In other words, those certain behaviors associated with motherhood are driven, at least in part, by alterations in brain function.

Mizrahi, who just had the findings published in the journal Neuron, commented that while the distinct brain changes linked with motherhood are known, it was the impact of those changes on sensory processing as well as the emergence of maternal behaviors that were unknown.

“In mice,” explained Mizrahi, “olfactory and auditory cues play a major role in the communication between a mother and her pups. Therefore, we hypothesized that there may be some interaction between olfactory and auditory processing so that pup odors might modulate the way pup calls are processed in the mother’s brain.”

The researchers exposed regular mice, mice that had experienced interaction with their pups, and lactating mother mice to pup odors, and then monitored both spontaneous and sound-evoked activity of neurons in the auditory cortex. The odors triggered dramatic changes in auditory processing only in the females that had interacted with pups, while the lactating mothers were the most sensitive to pup sounds. The olfactory-auditory integration appeared in lactating mothers shortly after they had given birth and had a particularly strong effect on the detection of pup distress calls.

Having been in the mother mouses’s situation, I’m commiserating. But it feels good to have science behind you.

A Nobel celebration for Israel

I don’t mean to brag, but… another Nobel Prize for an Israeli?
Everyone know that Technion Professor Daniel Schechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals last week. But it’s pretty mind-boggling to think that he’s the sixth Israeli to receive the prestigious prize in the last nine years!.
You’ve got Ada E. Yonath – awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome; Robert Aumann – awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis; Aaron Ciechanover – awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation; Daniel Kahneman – awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in prospect theory.

“This is a great day for me personally … and it’s definitely a grea day for science,” said Schechtman at a news conference held Wednesday. He added that the day was one of celebration for all scientists. “I’m sure the prize is also your accomplishment. It is because of you this field is successful.”
Once a source of ridicule, Schechtman won his award for discovering a structure known as a quasicrystal. According to New Scientist, materials with this structure are relatively new to science, and still something of a mathematical curiosity. But they have already found uses in steel armour, non-stick frying pans and devices in cars for recycling waste heat into electricity.

According to New Scientist, back in 1982, Schechtman’s claim to have discovered such a substance provoked so much controversy and ridicule that his boss asked him to leave the lab where he chanced on the discovery, at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Schechtman’s sin was to identify a crystal that broke a golden rule of chemical symmetry. He was eventually proven right though, and last week joined the list of notables for his achievements.

Back to why there’s a statistcally huge percentage of Israelis gaining international acclaim when we are too few to figure even as a marginal statistical error in world population figures, is something that has yet to be figured out. Saul Singer and Dan Senor’s great book Startup Nation offers some great reasons and should be a must-read for anyone interested in Israel.
But for the time being, let’s put the ‘whys’ aside, and celebrate another example of Israel and Israeli minds are helping to contribute to the world’s well being.

 

• Subscribe

  Subscribe to Israelity via email:

• Social Media

• Categories

  • A New Reality
  • Art
  • Blogging
  • Business
  • coexistence
  • Crime
  • design
  • education
  • Entertainment
  • Environment
  • Food
  • Foto Friday
  • General
  • health
  • History and Culture
  • Holidays
  • Immigrant Moments
  • Israeliness
  • Life
  • Medical Breakthroughs
  • Movies
  • Music
  • News
  • Nostalgia Sunday
  • Picture of the Week
  • Politics
  • Pop Culture
  • Profiles
  • Religion
  • Science
  • Social Justice
  • Sports
  • Technology
  • Travel
  • tv
  • War

• The Face of Israel Today

• 

• About Israelity

  Israel is often seen as a place of conflict and strife. In reality there is much more: there's business and research; art and culture; community and family. At ISRAELITY, Israelis blog their daily thoughts, experiences and insights. It's the real Israel, not the media's Israel. It's people living ordinary lives in an extraordinary place.

• Free newsletter

  Sign up for ISRAEL21c's free weekly newsletter Email:

• Stories from ISRAEL21c.org

  • Israeli swimmer strikes gold at European Championship
  • A new heart from old skin
  • Bar Refaeli voted Maxim’s ‘Hottest Woman in the World’
  • World’s top economists talk free market in Jerusalem

• Popular Posts

  • Foto Friday – Flowers of Jerusalem
  • Anti-Israelity in New York
  • Nostalgia Sunday – ViewMaster Israel
  • Cell phone at the supermarket? You can save big
  • Reconciliation through music challenged

• Recently Written

  • Just one minute
  • Foto Friday – Chaim Meiersdorf’s Israeli Weddings
  • Are you an Adviser or a Chooser?
  • Glorious Israeli spring
  • Ambivalent on Jerusalem Day
  • Nostalgia Sunday – Jerusalem 1967
  • Foto Friday – Flowers of Jerusalem
  • Celebrities r us in Israel
  • International Writer’s Festival a hit in Jerusalem
  • Adi Barkan’s BMI battle
  
  

• OUR COMMUNITY

• Recent Comments

  • Scott Sobel on Ambivalent on Jerusalem Day
  • Desperate on For Mother in Israel, it begins
  • thejerusalemcenter on Nostalgia Sunday – Jerusalem 1967
  • Nostalgia Sunday – Jerusalem 1967 | ISRAELITY on Nostalgia Sunday – 1967
  • Bhalchandra on Foto Friday – Flowers of Jerusalem