On July 10, GTIIT Commencement for Graduates 2023 was held at the Gym of South Campus. Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, Nobel Laureate and Special Envoy of the Technion President to GTIIT delivered a speech, encouraging graduates to ask questions, be independent and improve life.

The full text of speech is as below:

What a crowd, what a wonderful day to celebrate!

Dear graduate students, dear parents, dear family members,

I would like to first address the parents. You have reached a point where you see your little children that grew up in your homes graduating today. And you have made a long way to see them reaching this point, and you deserve huge applause for it. But there is a little bit of a sad point in this moment for you, because these are not your children anymore. They are adults – on the way to travel the world, to pave new roads for themselves and for the society. They will remain equal members of the family. But the childhood is left behind to new life for them. This is the payoff of having children that successful as yours. 

For the graduates, a minute ago, you are students. Now you are engineers, professionals. You joined me in person as a graduate of this wonderful institute called the Technion and the GTIIT. Try to look back for a minute and to remember: what did we teach you there? We didn't teach you test. Test is easy to teach and easy to learn, but it doesn't worth even the paper on which it is written, because knowledge is changing ever fast, and technology is changing daily. The technology of today is not the technology of yesterday, and it will not be the technology of tomorrow.

But what we taught you is what Li Yitong told you a few minutes ago. We taught you “Chutzpah”. We taught you daring, we taught you asking questions, taught you challenging authority. I remember very well a story on Nobel Laureate in Physics, Isidore Isaac Rabi from New York. In his kindergarten, he came home and he was asked by his mother, “Isidore, (not what did you learn today in the kindergarten, but) what questions did you ask today? What doubts you had about what your teacher told you?” This is what we taught you here. I think that these tools that you are taking with you today are eternal tools. They will serve you for the entire career, unlike tests that would have served you a day, a month, or a few months, but not more. But these tools that you are carrying with you that you are taught here will take you to solve all the problems, all the obstacles on your career road from now on.

Another point here is that you are independent until now you walked on kind of a paved road, you went to kindergarten, to elementary school, to high school, to the university, surrounded by parents and teachers. From now on, you are independent. You can consult around and ask questions, but you are on your own, to choose your way, to pave your road, and to change the society.

The academic world that we are living in is customarily divided into the world of science and technology. The scientists are those that discover the secrets, the mechanism behind, and then come the engineers and kind of working with bolts and nuts to solve problems. 

I think that this is an absolutely wrong view of what's going on. I'm dividing the world in my own words, to good science and bad science. Think about the contribution of technology to the world; think about space shuttles; think about understanding the universe; think about imaging on X-Ray, on MRI, on CT scan; think about microscopy understanding material; think about the little machine called the cell phone that is now communicating all of us - there are now 9 billion cell phones in the world. Many people are carrying one or two or three or more instruments on the body. This has become the best communication device in the world serving many purposes, not only talking to our friends and parents, but transmitting information on our health, so on and so forth. It's just the beginning of this era. This is all made by engineers, by technology. 

So technology is there, and it is recognized as contributing in a major way to the development of humankind. For you, you are scientists, you are technologies, you are engineers, you are whatever you are, you are there in order to innovate, in order to do things that people before you have not done, in order to improve the lives of people wherever they are.

This is the last point that I want to highlight: improving life. There is huge suffering in this world, both at the individual level and at the public level. At the individual level, there are health problems of people. Cancer has not been sold yet. Heart diseases, brain diseases, neural degeneration ... these have not been solved yet. Poverty is there to be solved. At the public level, we are just walking out of a huge pandemic. I can guarantee you there will be more. If we are learning from history, pandemics are there to repeat themselves. We have plague in the 19th century. We have a major flu in 1918. Then we had SARS and we had AIDS and we had monkeypox recently, and we have the corona and there will be more. And there are the forces of nature: earthquakes, floods, fires, drought, climate change. Those are huge challenges, both at the individual level and at the public level, that are all sitting in front of your door. 

Use whatever you have learned here in order to alleviate human suffering, wherever human people are living, wherever there is human life. And be careful also about this planet, because this planet is deteriorating because of climate change, because of changes that we are seeing daily in front of our lives, in front of our eyes. If we are not going to solve them, there will be no planet in decades. Initially, we were naive to think that these are problems that will hit our grandchildren and grand grandchildren. No, they are now behind the corner. Look at climate change, look at the drought in California, look at the high temperature in Pakistan that reached daily of 55 centigrade. At the high rate of abortions, life is invariable, not sustainable in this temperature, all these challenges are in front of you. And engineering will play a major role in solving them. 

So we are now walking into a new world. The world is in front of you. You will excel no doubt about it, but remember that you have a duty. The duty is to the society. You are carrying an international profession. Wherever you are going to have your career, help the society around you. From the depth of my heart, I wish you all the best in your career. 

Thank you very much.