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.
Nov 30, 2014...
Graduate students Eyal Karzbrun and Alexandra Tayar with Prof. Roy Bar-Ziv. Photo courtesy of Weizmann Institute
Years of intense lab work in Israel have led to the world’s first artificial cell-on-a-chip, an exciting development with many potential applications.
“The idea to mimic a living cell is a longstanding dream shared by many,” Weizmann Institute of Science Prof. Roy Bar-Ziv tells ISRAEL21c. “If we can build a primitive model of something so complex, we can possibly understand the dynamics of protein synthesis better.”
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/developing-the-next-generation-of-drugs/
Nov 20, 2011... Enzymes—the proteins responsible for chemical reactions in living cells—change their structure at dizzying speeds.This dynamic action makes them very efficient, but it can also make them difficult to study. Prof. Irit Sagi of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Biological Regulation develops new experimental tools and procedures to study shape-shifting enzymes in real time and at the scale of individual atoms.
Apr 06, 2009... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—April 6, 2009—The design of efficient systems, driven by sunlight, for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is among the most important challenges facing science today, underpinning the long-term potential of hydrogen as a clean, sustainable fuel. But manmade systems that exist today are very inefficient and often require additional use of sacrificial chemical agents. In this context, it is important to establish new mechanisms by which water splitting can take place.
May 16, 2016... Between shadowy hackers and powerful government agencies, keeping electronic communication private can sometimes feel like a losing battle. Now chemists have come up with a clever alternative that's a little old-fashioned. They describe in Nature Communications a way to encrypt and send short messages on paper using everyday chemicals as keys, although they admit its usefulness probably has limits.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/tough-science/
Oct 12, 2011...
Ada Etil Yonath
X-ray crystallographer currently at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. She won a share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on the structure and function of the ribosome. Yonath was born in 1939 in Jerusalem to a poor family. Her father died when she was 11 years old, and Yonath helped support her mother and younger sister. Yonath was the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel prize and the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/video-gallery/best-people-best-science/
Jul 06, 2016... The Weizmann Institute's most important asset is its people. That's why the Institute is committed to recruiting and nurturing some of the world's brightest young researchers. Here, six impressive new scientists – Drs. Ronen Eldan, Ofer Firstenberg, Yifat Merbl, Neta Regev-Rudzki, Nir London, and Efi Efrati – share how the Institute is helping them make breakthroughs in areas ranging from malaria to optics.
Mar 02, 2010...
Prof. Yoram Salomon (left) and Prof. Avigdor Scherz (right)
By combining three individually innocuous components, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers Prof. Yoram Salomon of the Department of Biological Regulation and Prof. Avigdor Scherz of the Department of Plant Sciences have created a toxic combination that destroys solid tumors. This cancer therapy, which is the result of nearly 20 years of collaboration between the two scientists, is being studied as a frontline treatment for prostate cancer. However, the strategy may work for other types of cancer as well. "In principle, right now, every solid tumor is potentially a target for this treatment," says Prof. Salomon.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/blowing-in-the-stellar-wind/
May 21, 2014... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 21, 2014—When a supernova – the explosion of a giant star – was discovered last year, astrophysicists, with the help of telescopes around the globe, rushed to observe the fireworks. With its dramatic dying flares, this star – a rare type more than 10 times the mass of our sun – can tell us something about the life of these fascinating cosmic bodies, as well as helping paint the picture of how all the heavier elements in the universe are formed.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/nobel-prize-in-chemistry-2013/
Oct 09, 2013...
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—October 9, 2013—The Weizmann Institute of Science extends its hearty congratulations to the new winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2013. Two of the three new laureates have strong ties to the Weizmann Institute, and their work on the use of computers to map chemical reactions of large molecules such as enzymes on the atomic scale was first developed at Weizmann.
Profs. Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt began their scientific collaboration in the 1960s at the Weizmann Institute, where Prof. Warshel was a doctoral student. The two of them worked with the late Prof. Shneior Lifson in the Department of Chemical Physics. Together, they developed a computer program that ran on the Institute’s Golem computer – a powerful device in those days – to model molecules. This program had special relevance for large biological molecules.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/gut-reactions/
Jul 28, 2015...
Daniel Segrè, associate professor of bioinformatics, biomedical engineering and biology, uses mathematical modeling to understand the microbiome. Photo by Cydney Scott
Daniel Segrè studies very unusual microbes. They don’t live in petri dishes, guts, or on dirty kitchen countertops. In fact, they don’t live in the real world at all. They live in a simulated world on Segrè’s computer.
Genetically identical to their living counterparts, these digital organisms look like a bunch of red, blue, and green blobs on a computer screen, and they feed on virtual nutrients, grow, excrete waste, and die just as they would in the real world. Segrè also works with living microbes, but the advantage of virtual organisms is that he can monitor how nutrients and energy flow among species – something that’s difficult to do in the real world.
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