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/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.
May 12, 2020... There’s an obvious risk to reopening the economy during the pandemic, even in places where the number of COVID-19 cases is dropping: As more people come back into contact, cases could surge again, and businesses could be forced to shut down a second time. South Korea is seeing a new spike in cases after the outbreak seemed to be under control. In China, new cases have emerged in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the virus. But an adjustment to work schedules—along with social distancing and other tools like contact tracing—could help businesses that can’t work remotely to potentially reopen safely.
May 24, 2020...
Researchers have a plan to mitigate the risk of a second wave of coronavirus infections — a scenario many experts think is likely. For some, it's an alternating cycle of four days at the office, then 10 days under lockdown. For others, it's a switch-off between 50 days under stay-at-home orders and 30 days of relative freedom.
In all likelihood, these tactics won't prevent cases from rising again.
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