Starting from this month, the "Guangdong-Technion Leadership in Science and Technology Lecture Series" will be held at GTIIT, to provide a platform for high-impact dialogues that explore topics that are pertinent to our faculty, our students, and our community.

The lecture series will consist of nine annual meetings, where each will consist of a 45-minute popular talk and a 45-minute scientific lecture and structured discussion. Due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, distinguished speakers who can't come to the campus will deliver their presentations via Zoom.

The first lecture this year is delivered by Nobel Prize Laureate (Chemistry 2004) Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, entitled The Road Between Patients and Curative Medical Technologies is Strewn with Bioethical Bumps: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond.

Lecture Information

Date: November 9th, 2021 (Tuesday)

Time: 19:00-20:30 (Beijing Time); 13:00-14:30 (Israel Time)

Venue: GTIIT Auditorium

Title: The Road Between Patients and Curative Medical Technologies is Strewn with Bioethical Bumps: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond

Speaker: Prof. Aaron Ciechanover

Technion Integrated Cancer Center (TICC), Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Special Envoy of the Technion President to GTIIT

Zoom Link: 

(1)By mobile phone: please scan the QR code to enter the lecture

(2)By PC: please click https://gtiit.zoom.us/j/95743793950?pwd=V2wrZG9XZ0dnb0oxOE5iL0U3MXNhdz09 to enter the lecture

Abstract

The realization that patients with apparently similar diseases – breast or prostate cancer, for example - respond differently to similar treatments and their disease course differ vastly, we have recently begun to understand that the underlying molecular mechanisms of what we thought is the same disease, are different in different people. Thus, breast or prostate cancers appear to be sub-divided to smaller distinct classes according to their molecular characteristics and the causing mutations. As a result, we are exiting now the era where the treatment of many diseases is "one size fits all", and enter a new era of "personalized medicine" where the treatment will be tailored according to the patient's molecular/mutational profile. The era will be accompanied by complex bioethical problems. Among them is that genetic information of large populations will become available, protection of privacy will become an important issue, and gene editing will have to be tightly regulated. The ethical issues have been accentuated along the recent pandemic, and one example is of course the anti-vaccination movement.

Introduction of Prof. Aaron Ciechanover

Prof. Aaron Ciechanover was born in Haifa, Israel in 1947. He is a distinguished research professor at 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 a military physician, after which he continued his studies and obtained his doctorate degree in biological sciences in the Faculty of Medicine in the Technion (D.Sc. 1982). At that time, Prof. Aaron Ciechanover was a graduate student under Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin A. Rose from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, USA, when they discovered that covalent attachment of ubiquitin to a target protein signals it for degradation. After deciphering the mechanism of conjugation, they 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 has 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).         

We are looking forward to your (physical or virtual) participation!

Please click the following links to read more stories about Prof. Aaron Ciechanover and GTIIT:

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Text/Photos: RIGS, GTIIT News & Public Affairs