The recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Israeli Aaron Ciechanover, talked about his discovery in Berlin.

Together with dozens of Nobel Prize laureates, Aaron Ciechanover was on a visit to Berlin, in honour of the 100-year anniversary of the publication of Albert Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity”.

The Berlin chapter of the German-Technion Society took the opportunity to capitalize on Ciechanover’s visit - inviting him to speak to its members at the Max Lieberman house.

Ciechanover is a professor at Haifa’s Technion in the department of biomedicine.

“Science is the ultimate language of peace”, Ciechanover said. “This is the language we can speak to with our German colleagues,” he continued, after referring to WWII.

“Some of my Jewish and Arab colleagues would theoretically be capable of stabbing each other in the back, if they were to meet each other on some secluded street. But in the laboratory, they are the most loyal of friends – they speak the same language,” he added.

Award-Winning Discovery

In the most unscientific and understandable of terms, Ciechanover explained why he won the Nobel Prize and gave insight into the world of scientific research.

Ciechanover won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for research he did over 25 years ago. “It took so long for my colleagues and me to be recognised for our achievements, because the impact that we had on gene technology has only borne its fruits now.

“Only after the drug industry applied our work, did the Nobel committee recognise the potential that our research has given to modern medicine in the combatting of cancers and other kinds of diseases.”

Prior to Ciechanover’s findings, the scientific world believed that proteins remained static once they were produced. Instead, they get produced and destroyed simultaneously.

“About 5 per cent of a human being’s proteins get destroyed every day […] Had the old theory been kept in place, then we could have only concluded that after 20 days, nothing would have remained of the original human being we would have known before […] But even after 20 days, the person we knew before remains the same person.”

By using this point of departure, Ciechanover made his award-winning discovery.

“Basically, my colleagues and I went on to discover the faucet in the human body that regulates proteins […] the process that turns their production on as well as that which kills them,” he said.

Constant Laughter

Ciechanover’s had a knack for keeping his speech light-hearted. He was successful at keeping his audience in awe and laughing almost uninterruptedly.

“If most professors would be capable of explaining complicated details in such a light-hearted manner, then more people would actually graduate from university having really learned something,” one of the evening’s guests said in jest.

Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology was founded in 1924 as an initiative of German academics. Albert Einstein led the German Committee for the support of the Technion Institute until it was dissolved by the Nazis in 1933.

The present-day German Technion Society was founded in 1982, in the footsteps of Einstein’s committee.