I’m very happy to join the Technion effort to build GTIIT in China’s Guangdong Province. I intend to do everything in my power to make GTIIT a state-of-the-art and world-renowned leading university, and infuse it with the highest standards of academic life, research, and teaching.
While the main thrust of the Institute at its outset will be environmental sciences, in due course I see it branching into two closely interconnected areas. I believe that in the 21st century our efforts will focus on the three following fields. The first field is the environment, and how to correct the mistakes of the 20th century, in which humanity turned a clean environment in a dirty one - spoiling our natural resources, burning up fossil fuels and creating holes in the ozone layer.
The second field is energy. We need to look for greener, cleaner sources of energy to counter the high rate of consumption of fossil fuels that were accumulated underneath the earth for millions and millions of years.
The third interconnected field is human health. As a physician, scientist, and researcher, I am occupied with human health issues, and especially the environmental effects on human health, including cancer, which is greatly affected by environmental factors like UV radiation, contamination, and air pollution.
As we embark in Shantou on a program in environmental sciences, I look forward to expanding, in the near future, to programs on energy resources and human health.
Israel and China both represent ancient civilizations, with tremendous traditions of teaching and education. We are looking forward to a joint collaboration in which we both learn from each other and together advance science for the benefit of humanity.
I invite you to join us as we embark on this wonderful journey.”
—————A letter from Professor Aaron Ciechanover
Professor Aaron Ciechanover
Aaron Ciechanover was born in Haifa, Israel in 1947. He is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. He received his M.Sc. (1971) and M.D. (1973) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He then completed his national service (1973-1976) as military physician, and continued his studies to obtain a doctorate in biological sciences in the Faculty of Medicine in the Technion (D.Sc.; 1982). There, as a graduate student with Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin A. Rose from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, USA, they discovered that covalent attachment of ubiquitin to a target protein signals it for degradation. They deciphered the mechanism of conjugation, described the general proteolytic functions of the system, and proposed a model according to which this modification serves as a recognition signal for a specific downstream protease. As a post- doctoral fellow with Dr. Harvey Lodish at the M.I.T., he continued his studies on the ubiquitin system and made additional important discoveries. Along the years it has become clear that ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis plays major roles in numerous cellular processes, and aberrations in the system underlie the pathogenetic mechanisms of many diseases, among them certain malignancies and neurodegenerative disorders. Consequently, the system has become an important platform for drug development.
Among the numerous prizes Ciechanover received are the 2000 Albert Lasker Award, the 2003 Israel Prize, and the 2004 Nobel Prize (Chemistry; shared with Drs. Hershko and Rose). Among many academies, Ciechanover is member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Foreign Fellow), the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of the USA (Foreign Associate), the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; Foreign Member), and the Russian Academy of Sciences (Foreign Member).
