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.

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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.

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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.

Montel Williams

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.

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A mom mouse and her pups

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.

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“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.

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Watch the stream live today from Jaffa starting at 9 am EST.

It’s really easy to sit at your kitchen table in Brooklyn, Toronto, Vancouver, or Berkley and shoot off comments about the Middle East conflict. It’s harder when you live in it. It’s hard when you have to think twice about taking the bus, plane, or train because it might blow up, and it’s hard knowing that every person who shares your society with you are paying the majority of their taxes to a staggering defense budget.

I live in Israel. I live in Jaffa, Israel — a city next to Tel Aviv populated by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Some of us are atheists, some traditional and others defiantly religious. I chose to live here and it’s a crazy place. It’s not crazy because people here care about their religion, enough to fight over it or talk about it incessantly. It’s crazy because of its improbability.

In Jaffa, some Muslims call themselves Palestinians. Some Christians call themselves Israeli Palestinian Christian Arabs. The Jews are just Israelis of course, unless they come from Arab countries and they are Sephardic or those from Europe say they are Ashkenazi. You can find escaped donkeys galloping down the streets at midnight. You can find the best European chocolate cake beside a working man’s morning hummous joint. My husband says he wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find a dead body on our front porch: there is also a lot of crime in Jaffa.

But Jaffa has its charm. Its own rhythm is marked by the five calls to prayer, with the one at sunset telling my baby daughter (who is Jewish) it’s time to go to sleep. It’s got a roughness, and sharp corners, and just when you think it’s too hard to handle, you’ll catch a new smell reminding you of some other time from our collective memory when civilization began, somewhere around here.

But more than people know, Jaffa — the city of the Bible where Jonah disembarks from before getting swallowed by the whale and spat out on shore near Nineveh — is a lens through which the world can understand cultural diversity, and cultural freedom in Israel.

Today at my home the East West House we will help host TEDxJaffa under the theme the Desire to Know the Other. There is a strong line-up of people from Jaffa, like my musician husband Yisrael Borochov, but also people from Israel and the Palestinian Authority who will tell their personal and professional stories on working to know the other. One speaker survived a terror attack and was afraid to look in the mirror to see how much of her face was left; one speaker will be a successful Palestinian policeman turned businessman; and if you log on to our simulcast today (or see the videos later) you’ll meet Haya Samir, an Israeli Muslim whose family came to Israel as political refugees from Egypt. Raised as a Jew, she found out as a young woman that she was in fact a Muslim.

Haya is an Israeli diva. And we are so glad to know her. Today she will sing songs of the pioneering days in Israel – Debka Fantasia – before 1948 when young Jews met Bedouin and Arab shepherds. These pioneers longed for a culture that combined, not defined, the Middle East with European values. I think this is what the people in the Arab uprisings are coming to terms with.

Would you like to get off your chair and dance to a little music with us LIVE? Maybe meet someone whose views might change your worldview about the Middle East conflict?

The simulcast starts at at 9 am EST time today Wednesday if you are in New York City. Log on at the TEDxJaffa site to see it. Officially in Israel the event starts at 3.

Alli Meets Aladdin

The idea for TEDx in Jaffa started with my friend Alli Magidsohn, who is producing and curating the event. The fellow Jaffinian, who is from LA, was inspired to fulfill this dream after an encounter with a man (a genie?) in Sinai named Aladdin.

Her words: “We felt lucky to have the opportunity to meet and form a new friendship in an overall context that might have otherwise limited us as enemies and spoke about the area’s conflicts, spirituality, Love, and many other things together. His perspectives broadened my mind and this encounter made me realize that as an American Jew living in Israel, even opposite an Muslim Egyptian man, there is still so much more that we have in common than there is that separates us.

“Other encounters in Sinai, Israel and Palestine led to further ‘broadening’, deeper respect and more curiosity, and TEDxJaffa is the manifestation of this process of personal expansion. ‘The Desire to know The Other’, for me – not necessarily for the event’s speakers – isn’t about explicit things like politics or peace or coexistence, it’s really about that desire to look from the inside, outwards, and to try to take in, understand, or somehow be enriched by exposing oneself to another person’s experience.

Log in folks at 9 am if you are New York or Toronto. All other cities: the event’s at 3 PM + 7 hours EST. Link from here.

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Observers of Ramadan can get to the goodies without debilitating headaches thanks to Israeli researchers.

For an entire month at the height of the oppressive summer heat, the observant Muslim population fasts from dawn to dusk, an effort that goes far past our 24 hour fasts for Yom Kippur, Tisha Be’av and the other lesser Jewish fast days during the annual holiday cycle. So we Jewish Israelis can certainly identify with the trials of our Muslim neighbors, as they abstain from eating for a whole month: so much so, that Israeli researchers have conducted a study on how to help Muslims avoid incapacitating headaches during Ramadan.

According to a study published in the journal Headache, about four of every 10 Ramadan observers get headaches. However, a pill produced by US pharmaceutical giant Merck called Arcoxia, may prevent the headaches from taking shape. The pill, made from the drug etoricoxib, had already been shown to be effective in a study that revealed that Jews fasting for Yom Kippur who took Arcoxia got fewer headaches than those that didn’t take the pill.

Reuters Health reported that in the new study, Michael Drescher, from Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, along with a group of Israeli colleagues, assigned 222 Muslim adults planning to fast in 2010 to either take the drug or an inactive placebo pill just before the start of fasting each day. All participants recorded how often they had a headache, and how severe it was.

After a week they switched treatments. During the first day of fasting, when headaches are thought to be most common, 21 percent of people taking Arcoxia reported having a headache, compared to 46 percent of those who took the placebo pill.

The Arcoxia group also reported fewer total headaches during that first week, the researchers wrote. And when they did have headaches, they rated them as less severe than participants taking the placebo.

Arcoxia isn’t currently approved for use in the US because the FDA decided it was too similar to another Merck drug called Vioxx, which was pulled from the market in 2004 when it was linked to a higher risk of heart attack. But Arcoxia is available in Israel, as well as other countries.

And as far as any Jewish or Muslim religious opposition to taking a pill to prevent headaches during their respective fasts, Drescher told Reuters Health that none of the Muslim participants expressed any objections, and that rabbis who were consulted pointed out that not having a headache could allow people to be “freer spiritually.”

“The religious edict to fast really is not a command to suffer,” Drescher added.

So from one fasting people to another, Ramadan Kareem!

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The visting American actors in scrubs at Hadassah University Medical Center at Ein Kerem. (Photo: Aviv Hayun)

For the second time in a month, actors who play doctors on American television series were brought as guests to the country for a vacation and meetings at hospitals where they viewed the latest medical procedures.

In May, members of the cast of the FOX series House – Lisa Edelstein, Omar Epps, Jesse Spencer, Amber Tamblyn – and David Shore, the show’s creator, executive producer and lead writer, used robotic surgical tools during a visit to the Sheba Medical Center’s medical simulation ward at Tel Hashomer.

And now, last week, Kevin McKidd and Sarah Drew, who portray Dr. Owen Hunt and Dr. April Kepner, respectively, on the ABC show Grey’s Anatomy, along with
Gregory Smith and Travis Milne, who co-star in the ABC police drama series Rookie Blue, and Lucas Neff and Shannon Woodward from the FOX sitcom Raising Hope, visited the robotic surgery laboratory at Hadassah University Medical Center at Ein Kerem, the Hadassah University Medical Center- Hebrew University Biotechnology Park and the Charlotte R. Bloomberg Mother and Child Center.

According to The Jerusalem Post, the delegation’s week-long trip was organized by America’s Voices in Israel and co-sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and by El Al Israel Airlines.

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“It’s humbling to see the work that real surgeons do,” McKidd told The Post.

The group’s itinerary included dinner at the 2C restaurant atop Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Towers where IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz, stopped by to say hello, stops in Jaffa, Sderot (where the actors spoke to film and TV arts students at Sapir Academic College), Nazareth and Safed, as well as climbing Masada, floating in the Dead Sea and swimming in the Kinneret.

Hopefully they didn’t encounter any incidents along the routes requiring medical assistance. If a fellow hiker or swimmer had called out, ‘is there a doctor in the house?’ how would they have responded?

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In seeking a topic for a local science contest held for 150 schools, Zoabi and her fellow teammates from Ort Achva Gilboa — a school in the Gilboa Regional Council — began researching the issue and met with Dr. Gabriel Herzel, head of Oncology at the Haemek Medical Center in Afula, who has been trying to find an effective solution for chemo with fewer side effects. Given that chemo injections are given through veins, the chemo spreads through the body, causing hair loss, nausea and other side effects.

The team came up with the idea of using a wig attached with sensors that can recognize the diseased cells and inject the treatment only to these cells using micro-needles, without damaging brain tissue. According to a Yediot Achronot article about the contest, the girls were inspired by acupuncture, which uses needles to heal problematic areas in the body.

The invention won second place in the contest, and they’re now going on to present their creation at an international competition in the Netherlands. The other inspiring part of the story? At least two of the honor students on the winning team are Arabs, offering a a welcome coexistence element to this particular invention.

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The history of healthcare in Israel is fascinating because it is so closely intertwined with the birth of the State and the political forces that shaped it, from the Ottoman and the British Empires to the Zionist movement with its need for a modern medical infrastructure. And while I personally belong to a competing HMO that is a mere 70 years old, it is safe to say that Israel’s healthcare system was shaped by the non-governmental, non-profit organization entity once known as Kupat Holim Clalit (General Fund for the Sick or ‘Sick Fund’).

Founded in 1911 as “the emissary of the organized working public in the Federation of Labor in matters of health in israel,” according to historian Prof. Shifra Shvarts in her book The Workers’ Health Fund in Eretz Israel: Kupat Holim, 1911-1937, it was intended to “extend medical assistance to its members, their families and parents; extend financial assistance to its members in times of illness; organize the workers’ health matters; and serve as social-medical insurance for the working public in Israel.”

At that time, there was also an immediate need to bring proper healthcare to the workers in the Land of Israel building the foundations of what was hoped would become the Jewish state. “The exigency for such a move was underscored by a tragic work accident in which a laborer’s hand was severed by a pump engine.”

The Labor Zionists were familiar with European labor movements and their health organizations, Shvarts notes, but there were certain characteristics that made Kupat Holim unique: it was informed by the Jewish traditions of “bikur holim”(visiting the sick), “linat tzedek” (caring for the sick at night) and mutual aid; it was an independent enterprise and not government supported; at its founding it was not politically affiliated (this came later); and, unlike the European pattern of providing medical coverage, it “became a health-service provider in its own right with its own salaried teams of doctors and nurses, and then hospitals.”

“Furthermore, the diffused geographical pattern of small clinics and health centers in Israel was unique, based on community ambulatory services that literally ‘brought health services to the workers’ wherever they lived.”

Kupat Holim became operational 13 months after its founding, with 150 members in seven branches. During the World War I, a decision was taken for the fund to be responsible for the entire Jewish working public, not just paying members. “It seems that this decision was a tremendous booster in improving the image of the fund… At the same time, [it] was a source of economic hardship that was to follow Kupat Holim and the Israeli health system as a whole…”.

In 1948, with the establishment of the State, Clalit was called upon to fulfill what it terms, “one of the most important missions in its history: the restructuring of its health care system to provide for the huge wave of new immigrants… [its] clinics quickly became a landmark in every neighborhood of the country.”

Not that Kupat Holim was always beloved. Historically, it was was affiliated with the Histadrut labor movement, which meant that membership in the health fund was contingent upon union membership. Also, quality of care was, to put it nicely, perfunctory. As the late, great Ephraim Kishon told it, in a footnote to his story The Bedside Manner:

“It is related that at one of the hospitals there was a patient who had undergone stomach surgery, and whose tormenting pangs of hunger the doctors were trying to relieve by hypnosis. ‘You are now eating potato soup,’ the doctor suggested. ‘A whole plateful of nourishing potato soup.’ ‘Why don’t you suggest something better?’ a sympathetic nurse asked. ‘Let’s say chicken casserole with French fries and lettuce salad.’ ‘Sorry,’ said the doctor. ‘This is a Sick Fund patient.’”

Clalit’s transformation from grudging provider of purple iodine into smiling healthcare service took off in 1995 with the passage of universal healthcare. Before the National Health Insurance Law, all the funds — Clalit, Maccabi, Meuhedet and Leumit — collected premiums directly from members. Today, a health insurance tax is collected via the National Insurance Institute for redistribution among the funds for a basic basket of health service. Additional income is generated by supplementary insurance to cover additional services not included in the basket.

A very good, if critical, essay about Israel’s healthcare system was posted a few years ago by an anonymous but well-informed blogger who notes that Israel’s conditions are uniquely favorable to universal healthcare: there is a sound population pyramid, high social prestige enjoyed by doctors, and no tort litigation/malpractice insurance cost spiral.

As for Clalit, today it runs 14 out of Israel’s 33 hospitals and more than 1200 primary and specialized clinics, and a countrywide network of state-of-the-art pharmacies, dental clinics, laboratories, diagnostic imaging and specialist centers. With 3.8 million insured members, it provides comprehensive health insurance and highly advanced medical care to the majority of Israel’s population. It is also one of Israel’s largest employers.

At the Centennial celebration, Clalit announced that it is setting up an archive and is seeking memorabilia, documents and other items documenting its history. A short movie in English about its history can be viewed here. And here’s a bit of Prof. Shvarts’ book:

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