Conversation with 2004 Nobel Prize winner Aaron Ciechanover, a scientist born and raised in a small country (Israel) and proud of it.
Grace: How was your experience as a scientist working in a small country, in terms of the infrastructure available? I'm asking this in the context of our situation(Philippines) where our brains have to go abroad to be able to do important work.
Prof. Ciechanover: I can tell you my story -- why I decided to go back (from the US) -- but it won't help you because I was backed up by a system that was receptive to me. I wouldn't have gone back if my institute didn't have start-up funds for me, laboratory and infrastructure, exactly the same word you used. I got a package deal that made it attractive for me to go back.
The love for my country was not sufficient. You cannot live on love,(laughter) especially love of country which is very vague. You need to have conditions to work...and it is the government who has to set up the infrastructure. We work closely with the government and we put money aside, raise funds to bring young people in.
When people ask me about the future, I tell them my future is behind me already. We build a lot on the young,talented people to come back and we generate talent for our own needs.
I notice that in the Philippines, that is not the case. I notice that numerically, you are probably the number one manpower exporting country in the world, and you are losing the best. You are not exporting farmers (not that farmers are not important), but doctors, high-tech people and nurses in which you invested a lot of money.
Grace: You mentioned that Israel never had a single day without war or threat of annihilation? To what extent do you think this affected your country's drive to do well?
Prof. Ciechanover: It's hard to say because we never had it any other way. But it had always been a tradition for Jews in Europe to study, before they even had a country, and they brought it with them when they established Israel.
You may look at it like with the development of computers. It all came from the space industry, of which the big pusher was the US. And you know where the space industry came from? From the tension between East and West. The war industry pushed the civilian industry, and then all of a sudden, Russia exploded. Nothing was left of the ideology, and this shows you that ideology in general worked for nothing.
You may argue that the need in Israel for maintaining the security (we have a very sophisticated defense industry) pushed a lot of education in engineering, electronics and computer science. I don't know if it would have been better or worse if we had peace instead. But if all your life you had to walk at the tips of your fingers (sic) rather than walking relaxed on the ground, it pushes you.
Not that I would prefer war to peace. I would prefer peace to war. But learning from the American experience and our own, it's an incentive for our country. Still, if there was peace around and the Arabs had collaborated, I believe it still would have been better.
Grace: In your personal case, it really didn't matter right?
Prof. Ciechanover: I was lucky. I was not wounded or hurt and lived a smooth life. I never was a refugee thrown out of my home. No real disaster in my life.
Grace: You mentioned that a new therapy for at least two types of cancer (multiple myeloma & non-Hodgkin's lymphoma) are now out in the market based on your discovery? (Ciechanover co-discovered why and through what system proteins are degraded in the body) What other innovations lie in store for the future?
The future is very promising but it will be slow because we are understanding more of the system and identifying more enzymes that can be drug targets in the future. There are thousands of these enzymes that act like policemen and identify which proteins are somehow not functional or not needed and so needs to be degraded.
We are just at the very beginning of drug targeting. And it will be for different diseases: known degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, additional cancers, inflammatory diseases, even infectious and viral diseases.
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Prof. Ciechanover was in the country recently to talk about why "Our Proteins Have To Die So We Can Live." Along with two other scientists, he won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Chemistry by going against the mainstream line of inquiry in cell biology, investigating the death of protein instead of the more commercially mined topic of how they are synthesized and transferred across generations.
