Picture, if you will, the seething look on the agitated faces of the European proponents of an academic boycott on Israel as they read this story about the evil! ghastly! winners of this years Nobel prizes for Science.
The same answer applied to five out of six of the 2004 science Nobel Laureates. Two are Israelis, three are Americans – all from California universities – and two of these Americans have close ties to Israel. The Israeli winners, Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, shared the $1.35 million Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Irwin A. Rose, professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine.
They were recognized for their research on the regulatory process taking place inside human cells, a discovery leading to the development of drugs against cancer and degenerative diseases.
"The practical applications are too numerous to mention," said Rose, who gave credit to Hershko.
In the typical research collaboration between professors and their graduate students, Rose became Hershko's doctoral thesis adviser when he spent part of his 1972 sabbatical at Hadassah-University Hospital. "I took my wife, four children, and mother-in-law and we settled in Jerusalem," he recalled.
Ciechanover, in turn, became Hershko's graduate student and over the next 19 years, the two Israelis spent the summers at Rose's lab at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
The two Technion researchers are the first Israelis to receive Nobel Prizes in a scientific discipline and their work has been supported for many years by the New York-based Israel Cancer Research Fund.
Jubilant Israelis likened the Nobel award to the Olympic gold medal won by Israeli windsurfer Gal Fridman. The prize was also seen as a fitting answer to some European academics who have called for a boycott of Israeli scholars.
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