Other than morning stubble and perhaps some smeared mascara — or, if you’re Johnny Depp, both — your reflection in the mirror probably doesn’t look radically different at 7 a.m. than it did the night before.
In actuality, however, it is remarkably different, and professor Aaron Ciechanover has spent a lifetime reflecting on it.
“Every day you destroy five to 10 percent of your bodily components and renew them. Our bodies are not the same from minute to minute and we are renewing ourselves as we speak,” says Ciechanover, a biology professor at Haifa’s Technion Israel Institute of Technology and one of a trio awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2004.
Along with partner Avram Hershko, Ciechanover became the first Israeli to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences (the third member of the team, Irwin Rose, is a professor at the U.C. Irvine College of Medicine and an American Jew). He recently left war-torn Haifa — where he was born and raised — for a lightning-quick trip to the Bay Area to meet with philanthropist Lorry Lokey, who had just handed Ciechanover and Technion $25 million.
Ciechanover’s prize-winning work came in the study of “ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation,” which is not the most user-friendly title — but then again, the complex title befits his complex field. Glancing out of a large bay window at rush hour traffic on San Francisco’s Market Street, Ciechanover improvised a series of explanations of his intricate microscopic world based on the people, cars and trolleys zipping about below.
The professor bluntly notes that if your body didn’t replace protein chains that had ceased to function, we would begin to rot and stink like rancid meat or spoiled milk. But the body’s mechanism for replacing dead proteins is “not like a bomb which would destroy everything. It is very selective. Imagine what would happen in San Francisco if the garbage collection of the municipality were to go on strike. All the garbage will collect around, it will stink and spread disease and people will escape the city,” he says with a wry grin while peering at the teeming streets below.
“Imagine what happens when the wrong proteins accumulate. There are many diseases associated with this [including] Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.”
A cacophonous wail of car horns erupted and Ciechanover hit upon another analogy.
“Imagine a production line of Ford automobiles in Detroit. No, let’s use a better company: Toyota. It has the quality control to distinguish between good cars, which go on to the franchises, and bad cars, which are taken away from the production line. So you can imagine the body also has quality control in distinguishing bad proteins and good proteins and removes some and maintains others.”
Ciechanover bristles at the term “applied science,” but it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure that understanding the mechanism the body uses to discern between beneficial and detrimental proteins — and moving toward having the ability to recreate this process on demand — could be a huge blow in the fight against cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or any number of diseases.
“You see? In five minutes I [explained to] you 35 years of my work and the work of many thousands of researchers, maybe 10,000 people’s work,” says the professor with a laugh.
The gift from Lokey — which came after a half-hour face-to-face meeting in May and arrived with “no demands, no conditions, no strings attached” — is the seed money for Technion’s Life Sciences and Engineering Interdisciplinary Research Center. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that Lokey invested in a building. He invested in allowing Ciechanover to create a whole new way of practicing science.
“Science is first and foremost about the people. Buildings protect you from the rain and house the equipment and have lounges, but people can also do that outside. Israel has beautiful weather,” he says.
In the long run, Ciechanover hopes to bring in 35-40 “full-blown faculty” from around the world, complete with their own labs and equipment and post-doctoral fellows and grad students and the whole shebang. And what these best-and-brightest are going to do is marry once-variant fields of science (hence the “interdisciplinary” part of the center’s title). It’s an endeavor Technion is uniquely suited to tackle; it’s a school with top faculty in the basic sciences, engineering and a medical school.
At Ciechanover’s center, scientists won’t feel constraints about following their interests. An electrical engineer could cooperate with a biologist to break new ground in imaging. Medical researchers and mathematicians can strike up partnerships. Ciechanover has no idea what diseases may be cured or patents earned, and he’s happy to be oblivious.
“I believe that science should not be directed. I believe only in a span of wings people can fly on, and those are the wings of their imaginations,” he says.
“If somebody came and told me he wants to study why the banana is curved, if he is imaginative and has a good track record, I’d take him. When he discovers what makes a banana curved, maybe he’ll discover why people have scoliosis.”
Ciechanover hopes to bring in top scientists from around the world — which might be a tougher sell now that Haifa is a favorite target for Hezbollah rockets (the professor grimly notes that one landed 100 meters from his office). But that hasn’t changed his plans one bit.
“To live in Israel, you don’t go just because you are competing against Harvard and Stanford. You go because you believe in a country that is just starting and has made some unbelievable achievements,” he says.
“If some bullets deter you, it is probably not the place for you.”