Posted on 06/19/2012 10:51:30 AM PDT by neverdem
When Dr. Avram Hershko, 74, a biochemist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and a winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was recently asked to name the most important fact of his life, he answered: “That I love my three grandchildren. For two, three days every week, I take them to dance class, sport and school. I am completely in their lives.”
Among top scientists, responses to such a question might well focus on prizes they’ve won or the import of their research. For Dr. Hershko, whose family was separated and sent to forced labor in World War II, family life trumps worldly accomplishments.
Yet Dr. Hershko’s scientific contributions are remarkable. His discovery of how individual cells destroy and eliminate malfunctioning proteins is a crucial component of efforts to unlock the mysteries of cancer and neurodegenerative disease.
We spoke when he visited New York...
--snip--
How does a cell know when to eliminate a protein?
There’s a tagging system. Every cell has within it a special protein that is everywhere: ubiquitin. Out of the thousands of proteins, this one tags damaged and bad proteins, binds to them and creates a molecular “kiss of death” until they are chopped up and degraded.
Did you discover ubiquitin?
Its existence was known. Its function was the mystery. Since the early 1970s, it’s been my focus. Much like watchmakers seeking to understand a clock’s mechanisms, my then-graduate student Aaron Ciechanover (who with an American researcher, Irwin Rose, shared in the Nobel Prize) and I cracked open cells and figured out how the various parts worked.
Understanding the ubiquitin system took us a while. By 1980, we could describe this tagging process. Once we’d done that, I became interested in how cells divide, because that’s important to understanding cancer...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That's about the number of different cell types in the human body, IIRC, a little over two hundred.
Looks like he's figured out more than one mystery.
FTA: “whose family was separated and sent to forced labor in World War II”
Is that what the NYT calls concentration camps these days?
Subtle softening of the horrors of the Nazis. How typical of the NYT.
Is that what the NYT calls concentration camps these days?
"After the war, we walked almost all the way back to Karcag. We had no idea where my father was. One night in 1946, he reappeared. He’d been taken to forced labor, first by the Hungarian Nazis and then by the Soviets. He arrived late at night and knocked on the window of my grandfather, who lifted him through the window, crying, “They are alive! They are alive!” My father was eventually able to teach at the Jewish school in Budapest. Then the Communists came to power. In 1950, we immigrated to Jerusalem, where he became a beloved teacher, again."
Not all were death camps. The Nazis were hard up for labor.
A distinction without a difference.
After being used up, they were disposed of.
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