Papal Visit Purim Millennium Snow in Jer. Many Lasker Award winners have gone on to become Nobel laureates. The recipients are Prof. Avram Hershko and Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, who will share the award with Prof. Alexander Varshavsky of the California Instituter of Technology. The Israeli researchers, from the Technion's Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and the Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences, were chosen for their pioneering research on the degradation of intracellular proteins. Over two decades ago, Hershko and Ciechanover became interested in the way in which proteins break down.
Proteins provide ways to moderate the body's machinery.
The ubiquitin system has become the key to the understanding of the emergence and progression of cancer, as well as other diseases. But I hope that through what we have done, some cure will be found for certain types. He was especially optimistic about colon cancers, cervical cancer, and melanomas, as well as some other tumors known to be caused by abnormalities in protein degradation. Ciechanover also attributes the importance of their work to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, along with immune and inflammatory disorders that affect the body's ability to fight such foreign invaders as viruses and bacteria. Hershko, born in Hungary in 1937, came to Israel 50 years ago.