haifa | Terrorists release a cloud of poisonous gas over a city. In response, defense forces shoot thousands of minute, remotely piloted unmanned vehicles — each the size of a gnat — into the sky. They find the gas cloud and attach to it, defining its size and shape, so detoxification efforts can begin.
Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are some of the most debilitating and dreaded neurodegenerative diseases of our time. While there is no cure, medications that fight their progression are on the horizon.
More than half the world’s population will face severe water shortages in the next 50 years. Offsetting measures such as desalination and other water treatment technologies will be crucial.
Challenges and solutions like those represent just a fraction of the scientific and medical breakthroughs under way at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
Here, professors and students at 40 research institutes wrestle with problems that most of us can barely comprehend. And Technion’s reputation as a world-class center of advanced research and learning was elevated last fall by the selection of two professors as Israel’s first Nobel laureates.
Yet the institute is reeling from a 20 percent budget cut from the government over the last three years. “I strongly criticize our government for its priorities,” Technion President Yitzhak Apeloig recently told visiting U.S. journalists. “If the government does not change its attitude over the next few years, we will have a major problem. … All of the new buildings, equipment, comes from donations.”
The American Technion Society provides about $30 million a year, he noted. “Without that money, there would be nothing here.”
Budget cuts make retaining talent a continual challenge. Of Technion’s 700 faculty members, many have ties to renowned institutions around the world that can lure them away. Likewise, advanced students are encouraged to do their graduate studies at elite schools outside of Israel. A major concern, said Apeloig, “is how to attract back many young Israelis, who are mostly [studying] in the U.S., as faculty.” Many receive “attractive offers,” he said, that Technion can not match.
Meanwhile, the innovative work goes on.
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Professor Daniel Weihs passes around a clear plastic cube you can hold between your thumb and forefinger. It encases a space vehicle that might one day save thousands, perhaps millions, of lives.
Modeled after the dandelion seed, it is a tiny parachute made of electrospun nanofibers that are highly sensitive to airborne toxins. When released into the atmosphere, it can discern chemical gases and cling to them.
“This shows where the cloud is and where it is going,” Weihs explains simply, “so crews can begin clean-up.”
More-advanced designs call for painting the cross-shaped, “remotely controlled unmanned space vehicles” with a substance that would change colors upon coming into contact with different gases. Another would add flapping wings, so the “seeds” can seek out noxious gasses. Still another involves releasing them as “chaff” from an airplane, to confuse radar systems of would-be attackers. The material for this defense-related tool was developed by Technion’s mechanical engineering department. Each filament is about one-hundredth the thickness of a human hair.
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Nanotechnology — developing materials and processes by manipulating molecular and atomic particles — has been a major focus of attention over in the department of materials engineering, says professor Wayne Kaplan: “We were doing this before ‘nano’ had a name.”
Kaplan’s office is located in the recently completed, six-story Dalia Maydan building — named in memory of the wife of Silicon Valley’s Dan Maydan, president emeritus of Applied Materials. Aftr her death five years ago, he led a campaign that paid for much of the $7.5 million building.
“We were in a horrible space, we didn’t know what to do,” says Kaplan. Now there is ample room for offices, classrooms, an auditorium, a library, and laboratories.
One will soon house an electron microscope that “is simply the best one in the world,” says Kaplan, exuding excitement. The $6 million purchase for two pieces of equipment is the largest Techion has ever made, he says.
A microscopist, Kaplan examines the properties of and between materials, a study that is essential in the development and design — atom by atom — of new materials and systems. Recently, the work of Kaplan and his associates has had useful applications in everything from the creation of transparent ballistic armor, to semiconducting polymers for phone screens, to biomaterials used in implants. Using extreme magnification and technology that allows them to manipulate objects the naked eye can’t possibly see, Kaplan and others “can make devices and test them and examine their properties.”
The new electron microscope will allow them to see “way below the size of the atom,” he explains.
Born in the United Sates, Kaplan came to Israel as a college student, “fell in love with the place,” and stayed.
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Born in Tehran and schooled in England, Moussa Youdim says it was during his master’s studies at McGill University in Montreal that he began to examine Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases. At the time, “My father became sick with depression. There were no drugs for neurological disease.”
He turned his attention to the nascent field of neurochemistry, got his Ph.D. in psychiatry and biochemistry, and went on to hold teaching and research posts at University of London and Oxford, among others. When offered the opportunity to set up the pharmacology department at Technion, he accepted, immigrating in 1977.
Never losing his focus, Youdim has worked with colleagues to develop some recently patented drugs that hold promise for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.
“We feel very proud, because we’re competing with some of the largest drug companies in the world,” says the affable, gray-haired professor.
He has already developed “anti-Parkinson’s drugs” marketed in Israel and Europe, and Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical will be releasing a new one in March — “an important drug that can help early- and late [stage] Parkinson’s,” he says. The pill has very few side effects.
In addition, Youdim pursued his “crazy idea” to develop a derivative of his Parkinson’s drug, for use in the treatment of Alzheimer’s. Clinical trials are under way.
Youdim’s hope is to produce a drug that will treat not only the symptoms of neurological disease, but prevent the degeneration of neurons that lead to its development in the first place. When this happens, “I will be taking this every day, prophylactically, for Parkinson’s.”
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Looking at a screen and operating a joy stick, a surgeon guides a minuscule robot through a spinal procedure to cure a patient’s back problem. This is not sci-fi.
Professor Moshe Shohan predicts that medical robotics will have far-reaching uses: “We ourselves don’t know yet all the applications for medicine.”
Shohan, whose background is in aeronautical engineering, heads Technion’s medical robotics laboratory, where doctors, engineers and medical students collaborate on projects.
“The robot gives you high accuracy, high accessibility, lower radiation for the doctor and patient, and minimally invasive surgery,” he explains. He foresees its use in reconstructive knee operations, maxifacial surgery, even heart bypasses. In spinal procedures, the miniaturized robot would attach to vertebra, receive its marching orders from a computer, and, when its work is done, the robot would be removed and disposed of. The FDA-approved product, which is being manufactured and marketed by a company Shohan founded, is in limited use at clinics in Cleveland and Texas. Its first full-scale applications will most likely take place in Israel.
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Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink?
Well, not exactly. But the picture is frightening, if you listen to professor Raphael Semiat, who leads Technion’s water research institute and Rabin desalination lab. Some 1.5 billion people do not have access to an adequate, safe water supply, he says.
Through desalination, wastewater treatment and other technologies, Israel is finding solutions to its problems and those of others. Technion scientists serve as consultants to Mideast nations facing similar problems, and participate in joint projects with such countries as Jordan and Egypt. They also cooperate with the Palestinian Authority in addressing shortages close at hand.
“Water is still the source of life,” says the serious Semiat. “If we don’t have water, we have to go away …”
In the same breath, like many other scientists at Technion, he expresses optimism for the future, saying, “Now, we have solutions.”
Liz Harris was one of six journalists to visit Technion on a recent trip sponsored by the American Society for Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.