There is still a lot to discover about the functioning of the mechanisms in the body, even the most basic ones such as the brain. says Prof. Tim Hunt, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2001 *First interview in the series - hoping to interview all the distinguished guests at the conference of Nobel Prize winners saluting Israel on its 60th birthday, which will be held at the Technion on May 19, 2008
Ten Nobel laureates will participate in a special salute event in honor of sixty years of science in the State of Israel, which will be held at the Technion in preparation for next Independence Day. Professor Michael Aviram from the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion, the organizer of the event, said that the response to the Technion's initiative by the Nobel laureates was great and enthusiastic.
The Nobel laureates who will participate in the event that will be held at the Technion campus on Monday, May 19, 2008, will be:
Prof. Robert Uman from Israel, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics;
Prof. Gunter Blubel from the USA, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987
Prof. David Gross from the USA, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2004;
Prof. Tim Hunt from Great Britain, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2001;
Prof. Avraham Hershko from Israel, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry;
Prof. Kurt Wuttrich from Switzerland, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2002;
Prof. Elie Wiesel from the USA, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize;
Prof. Jean-Marie Len from France, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987;
Prof. Farid Mord from the USA, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine
Prof. Aharon Chachanover from Israel, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The event will be opened by the president of the Technion, Professor Yitzhak Apluig, with a lecture on the topic: "From Chemistry to Medicine". The guest lectures will include diverse and fascinating topics such as "from basic to applied science", "science as an adventure", and "the future of physics".
The event will be open to the general public and scientists and students from all over the country will be invited to it. The Nobel laureates will meet with outstanding students and scientists in their fields of research, visit the relevant faculties at the Technion and travel in the north of the country.
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2001, Professor Tim Hunt from Great Britain, wrote to Professor Aviram that he would be happy to participate in this scientific salute event at the Technion. "I greatly appreciate the great vitality, knowledge and lack of formality of the Israeli scientists," wrote Professor Hunt.
Professor Tim Hunt from Great Britain won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2001 for his research on the control of cell division. Already as a teenager, Tim loved chemistry and biology thanks to his teachers Colonel Simmons and Terence Doherty who concentrated on studying principles of action and not just phenomena. In this direction, he continued studying biology in high school and biochemistry in Cambridge, under the guidance of Asher Koerner, who gave his students, including Tim Hunt, freedom of action to investigate various aspects of nucleic acid and protein metabolism, and from here the path to researching the control of cell division was clear. Prof. Hunt agreed to be interviewed by the science website, and we hope in the future The series will talk to some of the distinguished Nobel Prize winners who will come to the event.
What would you like to talk about at the Nobel laureate symposium?"I still haven't decided exactly what I will talk about, but I will almost certainly talk about the subject that I have been researching for a long time (and for which he won the Nobel Prize) - the control of cell division, since I have been interested for many years in how the basic mechanism of cell division works. I believe that we are still far from understanding the control of cell proliferation. We know about many growth factors, and we have clues as to most of the phenomena, but we have a long way to go before we truly understand how multicellular organisms develop. "
And what are the breakthroughs in this field?"Just recently I worked on a family of enzymes called "kinases" (KINASES) and when the cell's genome is duplicated and reorganized in preparation for division, the kinases attach phosphorus to other proteins that control the processes of cell division in order to activate them, and when the cell division ends, the phosphorus is removed from those proteins and the kinases stop working. We discovered that the enzymes that are responsible for attaching the phosphorus are activated when the division operation begins and their operation stops when it ends. The analogy is a plug in a sink - when you want to fill the sink with water, you seal its drain hole with the plug, when you want to empty it, you pull out the plug. If the faucet is left open after the stored water is emptied, the speed of entering and exiting the water will be the same. "
"This is only a small breakthrough in the understanding of cell division and its proliferation, but it is a mechanism that has not been correctly evaluated for 25 years.
It is important to note in this context that there are questions that we do not yet know how to deal with. For example, we still don't know what causes cells to stay in the right places relative to other cells. Seemingly such questions are simple, but the answers to them are complex and I don't know if we will reach a solution within one year or within 100 years."
Not only in mathematics there are open questions for a long time...?"In the field of life sciences there are more open questions than in any other field."
Do you believe that the answers will come from multidisciplinary studies?"In the past this was often the case. Improvements in the technological field or in methodologies caused progress in other fields - for example, imaging systems such as X-rays and crystal theory led to many understandings about large molecules such as proteins and DNA. Now we have sharp enough tools, but it is not clear to me where new ideas will come from. It is possible that a combination of computer science and life science people will allow us to better understand the brain, how it is wired and how it works. There are huge questions in this area as well that we still don't know how to answer, for example when you see your grandmother, how do you recognize her, or how do we know how to differentiate between a good piece of music like Mozart's piano concerto, and just hitting the keys, and how you perceive something beautiful and something Another as ugly, and the same in the sense of smell, why one smell is considered a good smell and the other stinks.
Do you know other Nobel laureates who will take part in the event?I know the two Israeli winners from the Technion, Prof. Avraham Hershko and Prof. Aharon Chachanover because they work in a field very close to the field in which I work.
They say it took a long time before their contribution was recognized?My case is also similar, and the times are more or less close, although in the case of Hershko and Chechenover it took longer. We worked more or less at the same time. They did a beautiful and original job that turned out to be very important. One of the reasons why in the field of life sciences recognition takes longer is that it is not so clear at the time how important any discovery will turn out to be. In the first stage, only very few other researchers know about the discovery, and it is not always clear that it will have a wide impact on research in the field and that it will become its basis. It took a long time to recognize that the ubiquitin system, which is present and works in all cells and organisms except bacteria, is a central system for eliminating proteins that are not needed and for controlling essential processes in the cell. In the end justice was done and in my opinion it is a reward they deserve without hesitation.
What do you wish for Israel and Israeli science on the XNUMXth Independence Day?There are excellent scientists in Israel. I hope that Israelis will win more Nobel prizes. I know what is happening in Israel in my field and I have even visited the Weizmann Institute several times, the last time about a year ago. I was very impressed with what was happening there, especially in the field of biology. I wish it continues like this.
What do you think about the repeated attempts to boycott the Israeli academy, by its colleagues in Britain, your country?I am very disappointed with these attempts I hate these things. I signed a petition against the boycott. I do not believe that any boycott could have influenced the Israeli government. There are Israeli academics, including my friends, who criticize their government's policies. At the same time, you should continue to be in contact with someone you want to understand you, and not cut ties with them, but rather increase them.
What do you think about the crisis in universities in Israel?I don't know much about this, but as it sounds, it is a similar crisis affecting all higher education systems in the world. It's a complicated question, who should pay for academic research in universities. The government's intervention in the management of the universities, among other things by influencing the budget, is dangerous, because they do not understand what the role of the university is. In the USA for example, there is a mixture of private universities and universities funded by the state. Some time ago I tried to establish a biotechnological research institute in Cambridge in the UK, and I was surprised that when I approached companies in the field and asked them to donate money to build a building for the institute and operate it, their answer was "we pay taxes for this, why else?". I was shocked by the answer. There is a debate whether the government should use the money to maintain the universities or to subsidize farmers or to build roads. I don't know the best way to allocate resources.
I don't like government interference in academic freedom. The academics know what to do. It is quite complicated and dangerous to depend only on the government, because it gives too much power to politicians and harms the independence of academic institutions.
What do you think about the limitations on the study of evolution in the US, something that is already beginning to trickle down to Europe?"I don't understand what the problem is at all, since the truth is known. But I wonder how the people who deny evolution think. How do they think life originated? Tracking every creature through the fertilized eggs from the dawn of time, testifies to the continuity of life on Earth. No one suggests the existence of a spontaneous creation of life. Humans have children, and when they grow up they also have children, but we also know that although they are similar to their parents, they are also slightly different, and this is how evolution works. I don't care that anti-evolutionists have an alternative answer. Evolution explains the facts much better. "
"As I already mentioned many scientific ideas are simple but the explanation behind them can be quite complicated. For example, I also do not understand certain phenomena in physics and there are many things that I do not know how they work. Even in evolution, the answer to how this is done is not easy to explain, to those who are not in the field. When I read the writings of creationists and other evolution deniers, I did not find that they had any other answers. Their main argument is based on finding weaknesses and problems in the scientific explanation. I do not deny that there are problems because it is difficult to understand how, for example, the brain or the eyes develop. But they do not offer a logical alternative, but only the argument that God created the world in seven days, which is illogical and untrue."
