Aharon Chachanover talks about the 3,000 emails waiting for his answer, about the difficulty in getting funding for research and about the "Haaretz" newspaper, which is used as a cover for salted fish
Tamara Traubman, Haaretz, Walla News!
Six days before the scheduled meeting with Aharon Chachanover, the announcement was made that Abraham Hershko and he, both professors from the Technion in Haifa, had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For the first time, Israeli scientists won the most sublime recognition in science. Blessings and requests for interviews from all over the world flow into his office. Anywhere else in the world a Nobel laureate is a man in a tie, but Chechenover, 57, still comes to work in jeans and a blue shirt and treats his guests to warm Borax, served on a lab napkin that looks like a disposable diaper.
He is known as a cordial and direct man. About a week after the announcement of the Nobel prize, he announces that he is "exhausted". "It brings about a change in behavior. it does not fit to me. They say I'm nice, I'm not sure anymore. The hundredth phone comes and the man who calls doesn't know it's the hundredth phone, he just tried to call all day and couldn't get through the lines, terrible." He has already answered 1,000 e-mails he has received. 3,000 more are waiting for him. "The memory is going to explode, in my opinion, soon there will be no more e-mails coming in because there will be no more memory."
Chechenover, Checha in the mouth of his friends, is a definite hoarder. And like every Israeli, he has an opinion on every matter and he does not hesitate to express it. For example, "Haaretz" is "the most serious newspaper". His favorite part is the "gallery" supplement and he doesn't read the first page, "because the next day it's good for wrapping salted fish and what they wrap fish with doesn't interest me. Sometimes the newspaper deteriorates and people with an agenda publish things against the universities without checking. You are not the New York Times, you do not come close to his tail."
Still, since the announcement of the win, he tries to adopt a more diplomatic language. "I have a very sharp tongue and I am sure I will fail again", he admits. "I have no doubt that one day someone will hunt me down." His relations with Prof. Hershko, with whom he won the Nobel Prize, cooled over the years. Some colleagues said that for periods of time the two even stopped talking to each other altogether. Chakhanover says: "Relations are fine, we talk when necessary." On several occasions he expresses great appreciation for his colleague and emphasizes that he was his student. "I had a good teacher, Prof. Hershko", he notes.
During Chechenover's doctoral thesis, the pair of scientists discovered the ubiquitin system, which tells the cell which proteins are meant for degradation and participates in the incessant turnover mechanism that enables the existence of living things - from plants to humans. "We chose a system that seemed important to us, but we didn't expect how much," says Chakhanover. "The chance of Israeli science competing with great American science is small. For almost 15 years we were without competition, people didn't notice how important this system is."
A scientist, however well-known in the professional community, usually resides in his laboratory away from the spotlight. The Israeli public is rarely interested in what scientists have to say. Chechenover is aware of the status he has earned. Suddenly everything he says becomes important and worth quoting. "Members of a Swedish committee came and gave us international approval, and suddenly I became a movie star and a beauty queen," he says. "It's a bit funny and pathetic that we need permission from Swedes to find out the national agenda for us."
Research is in existential danger
He uses the opportunity to warn about the seriousness of the crisis in universities and research and the deterioration of the education system in Israel. "We are destroying the foundation of the State of Israel with our own hands. We are in the wrong order of national priority," says Chakhanover. "We are a country that has no treasures. A Jewish head, that's what we have. Everything that was and will be in this country is a direct and distinct product of higher education. If we damage this system we will deteriorate radically and cease to exist.
"You have to understand the time scale here. The time scale of a politician varies between primaries and primaries, and in Israel two to three years pass during this time because the elections are almost never held as a rule once every four years. The timelines of a research system are completely different. Let's take an average professor at a university in the State of Israel, who advanced relatively quickly and became a full-fledged professor known in his field. He was in the education system for 45 years until he became a full professor, a man who is a renowned independent scientist. Now the government comes and tells the universities: from today you will recruit fewer faculty members. For the politicians it suits because for them there is no harm here; Their schedule is two years - and in two years the damage will not be felt. When will the damage be felt? In 10 or 15 years, when the staff will gradually retire and their equipment will become obsolete. We will be faced with a broken trough and then we will decide that we want to rebuild it, but it will take us another 15 years to do so.
"We must change our socio-national agenda today and save the education system," says Chakhanover. "To remove education from the framework of the primaries of the ruling parties in the State of Israel. allocate to it ever increasing long-term national resources. And never touch them, no matter what. The State of Israel was founded, exists and breathes on this, and this issue is outside of any national debate forever and ever."
What do you suggest to a scientist who is at the beginning of his career today?
"I am afraid that young scientists will see what is happening and will no longer go (to a career in academic research, XNUMX). Soon we will not have a generation at all. The treasury boys will come and say what you are crying about, who came to you anyway."
Until a year ago, Chechenover sat on the board of directors of the Haifa Theater. He also warns against the damage to culture. "During the entire time I was a member of the board, this theater groaned. He became bankrupt, in fact he is in an impossible deficit, along with the other theaters in Israel. What will we live on? What is measured with? By force of arms? A nation is measured by cultural and educational values. We took the education and culture system and turned it into a target for constant shooting. We are bleeding, we are bleeding our culture and our values."
According to him, "These are values that the Jews brought from Europe. My dad is in Poland, what has he been doing all day? sat in the room and studied. I remember in my childhood, that Jews brought from Persia and Morocco sat in tents dripping with rain. I remember that my parents adopted a child at home. A child for winter, named Uriel. We would bring him home so he wouldn't get pneumonia and send him to school together with my brother so he could get an education, and we would feed him, and in the summer we would return him to his parents when the rains ended. And here arose an extraordinary education system. The product of this education system is speaking to you. And what we are doing today is to go and hurt her. This thing cannot continue, and the leaders must take it to their attention and change the agenda of this country."
11,500 net
Hershko and Chechenover won the Nobel not because of the scientific infrastructure of the State of Israel, but in spite of the many difficulties piled up in the path of those involved in science. His research does not require particularly expensive and sophisticated equipment, yet, in order for the laboratory to function well, he needs 400-300 thousand dollars a year. He must collect this amount from research grants awarded by science foundations in Israel and abroad. "I manage to raise this amount, but it is an impossible task. It is completely exhausting."
Since the grants given in Israel are not large, in order to raise the necessary money he must win eight or nine research grants a year. "Now I'm in the middle of writing an application for a grant to the academy. Unfortunately, the Nobel Prize will prevent me from applying for one grant that I wanted, because I am not enough; Writing the grant applications and the research report - this is almost a full-time job. And the system was also very generous to me."
In his office he randomly pulls out three payslips. The Nobel laureate, it turns out, earns about NIS 11,500 net per month. "So I'm sorry", he says sadly. "I sit on all kinds of scientific boards of biotechnology companies. Tell you I love it? No. If I had the option, I wouldn't do it."
When asked where he will be in five years, he says that he does not know. Maybe not in Israel. He received very attractive offers from respected and large research institutes in the United States. attracts him to do "great science" and he is exhausted from the endless pursuit of a budget for his research. "What will keep me here? My Israeliness. Maybe what I will do in the end will be to divide my time between here and there."
The phone call from Sweden was "12 seconds of life"
Chechenover grew up in an average blue-collar home in Hadar Carmel. When he was ten years old he lost his mother and about five years later his father also died.
With such a background you could have reached a very different place than winning the Nobel.
"To the prison, for example? Three people saved me: my aunt, the late Miriam Vishniak, who took me into her home; And then my brother and sister-in-law, Yossi and Atara Chakhanover. I was an orphan, raised by an aunt. She sent me to high school. After that I no longer needed almost anything, because I went to the reserve and studied medicine. Later the house of my brother and sister-in-law became a second house. They held me."
Chechenover is not religious, but it has "enormous religious values." I am a fan of singing. I studied a lot of Talmud with a rabbi, and medicine and Halacha." What else does he like to do? "I have friends, I walk with them in the sea, I have a class for antique watches in Haifa. I listen to music non-stop. From Abba and the Beetles to Beethoven's Fifth and Alain Pertusch. modern music. I am an opera lover."
Rumors that Reshko and Chechenover might win the Nobel have been swirling for about three years. "But the process of choosing the winners is so secret, that I didn't even know if we were nominated or not," says Chechenover. "Last Monday, people from the lab looked on the website to see who won the Nobel Prize in medicine. I thought: if this happens, it won't be this year anymore. On the eve of Simchat Torah I was about to leave the house for some last shopping, when my son told me there was a phone call from Sweden. I have friends in Sweden. I thought they must be calling to invite me to the conference. Then the voice on the other end of the line tells me, 'Very pleasant, speaking the secretary of the Swedish National Academy of Sciences. I congratulate you on your selection as the winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Those were 12 seconds of life."
