About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the benefit of humanity.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/intermittent-lockdown/
Mar 31, 2020... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—March 31, 2020—Think of dieting. You can fast for two months and lose weight, but you will probably die. Even if you survive, you will quickly gain weight again. Similarly, a two-month lockdown will suppress the coronavirus, but it will kill the economy. Lockdown will push hundreds of millions of people globally into unemployment and poverty. Many sectors of the economy will collapse. At the end of each lockdown, remaining patients will cause a resurge in the epidemic, forcing another lockdown.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/navigating-the-new-normal/
May 06, 2020... To roll back this calamitous cascade of events, we need exit strategies— integrated sets of policies that will enable a responsible re-boot of productivity while minimizing the risk of COVID-19 resurgence. One component within such a broad strategy, recently proposed by the Weizmann Institute’s Prof. Uri Alon and Prof. Ron Milo, rests on a novel mathematical model for public health involving a cyclic schedule of lockdown and free movement.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/covid-19-is-all-about-the-curve/
Apr 26, 2020... Prof. Doron Lancet of the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science says that the Covid-19 curve has developed in the same trajectory in many countries regardless of their lockdown policies. By his reckoning, the significant statistic is not the number of cases but the pattern of development, which is similar in every country including Israel and is currently falling. According to Lancet, it was not the lockdown that led to the change in direction in Israel, or at least not just the lockdown, but something natural in the development of the disease and he insists that a comparative analysis proves this. By this logic, even the complete relaxation of the lockdown (although this is not necessarily what he recommends) would not result in the kind of figures being seen in Italy or New York.
May 08, 2020...
It started with a tweet. Alpha Lee, co-founder and chief scientific officer of machine-learning company PostEra, read on Twitter that Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility, had identified a set of chemical fragments that attach to an important coronavirus protein.
Lee wondered if his company, formed just six months earlier, could help connect the dots from fragments to viable drugs to fight COVID-19. PostEra uses AI algorithms to map routes for drug synthesis to speed the drug discovery process. But to do so, they would need some design ideas. So Lee asked the Internet.
May 09, 2020...
Collecting data and maintaining privacy do not have to rule each other out, according to computer scientist Shafi Goldwasser.
Goldwasser, 61, a professor at MIT, UC Berkeley, and Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, is a Turing Award and Gödel Prize laureate. She is also the co-founder and chief scientist at Duality Technologies Inc., a Tel Aviv and Maplewood, New Jersey-based startup that develops technologies for sharing and analyzing encrypted and anonymized data.
May 11, 2020...
If we cannot resume economic activity without causing a resurgence of Covid-19 infections, we face a grim, unpredictable future of opening and closing schools and businesses.
We can find a way out of this dilemma by exploiting a key property of the virus: its latent period — the three-day delay on average between the time a person is infected and the time he or she can infect others.
People can work in two-week cycles, on the job for four days then, by the time they might become infectious, 10 days at home in lockdown. The strategy works even better when the population is split into two groups of households working alternating weeks.
Apr 26, 2020... In this videoconference hosted by Weizmann Canada, Profs. Uri Alon and Ron Milo present their bioinformatics-based exit strategy, which Prof. Milo describes as “‘biology by the numbers’ meets the coronavirus.”
May 04, 2020... In this video, Profs. Ron Milo and Uri Alon succinctly and clearly explain their “intermittent work” strategy for restarting the economy without triggering a new wave of COVID infections.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/paying-the-price-of-protection/
May 19, 2020... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 19, 2020—Is the wanton killing of cells in autoimmune disease a case of mistaken identity, or does it arise from an important physiological service? The first is the commonly accepted view – that autoimmune attack is a sort of mistake. But the latter view may be closer to the truth, according to a new model proposed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Among other things, the model suggests a solution to the long-standing riddle of why some organs are susceptible to autoimmune diseases while others are not. The findings were published in the journal Immunity.
May 17, 2020... Dr. Nir London discusses the “COVID Moonshot” project in this videoconference. The global initiative, which currently includes nine partners, aims to develop a “cheap and safe” antiviral treatment for COVID on a much faster timeline than traditional drug discovery.
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