This news was actually, without intending to, the harbinger of the Nobel Prize that came a little more than a year and a half later
Prof. Aharon Chachanover of the Technion is the recipient of the Israel Prize in the field of biological research for the year 1947. Research Prof. Aharon Chachanover was born in Haifa in 1974. He graduated with high honors with a master's degree in medical sciences at the Hadassah School of Medicine and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he also completed his medical studies in 1982. In XNUMX he received a Doctor of Science degree from the Faculty of Medicine of the Technion.
He wrote his doctorate under the supervision of Avraham Prof. Hershko, in the work in which they both discovered the ubiquitin system, which marks proteins intended for degradation in the body. This marking allows the body to eliminate unnecessary proteins and leave the intended proteins intact to continue functioning. This discovery brought about a real revolution in the understanding of the regulatory mechanisms of intracellular processes and serves as a basis for thousands of publications and books and the establishment of biotechnology companies, the search for cures for diseases, which are caused by a disruption in the breakdown of proteins, diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and many types of cancer.
After a post-doctoral research period at MIT (1984-1981), in which he characterized the cellular functions of the system in collaboration with Prof. Avraham Varshavsky, Prof. Chechenover returned to the Technion and has since been a faculty member of the Technion's Faculty of Medicine. In the years 2000-1994, Prof. Chachanover served as the director of the Rapaport Institute for Research in Medical Sciences at the Technion.
Prof. Chechenover has published more than 90 original research papers on the ubiquitin system. He is a member of prestigious scientific societies such as the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Asian Molecular Biology Organization (IMBN) and has been invited to lecture at countless prestigious international conferences. In 1999, he won the Outstanding Scientist of the Year award from the "Jewish National Fund" and also received the prestigious Wachter Award, awarded by the University of Innsbruck in Austria. In 2000, Prof. Chachanover, together with Prof. Hershko and Prof. Varshavski, received the Lasker Prize, which is considered the second Nobel prize in the field of medicine. Prof. Chechanover received an honorary doctorate this year from Tel Aviv University.
