By Yael Stein ~
Where Israeli campus hallways resound with whine of basement brain-lab rows to roof-top observatories of physics. The whine never ceases. Unzipping proteins or constructing quantum technologies, Israeli researchers have gained global fame for out-of-proportion access. And at its brightest shine, that glint has not escaped the world’s notice: Israel, with fewer than 9 million citizens, has had on its soil 12 Nobel laureates, and many of them from economics and chemistry.
While the world grapples with ever more tangled-up challenges, ranging from pandemics to global ecological crises, Israel’s scientific and academic prowess is more than ever before linked in one language—new technology, cures, and concepts that will define our common future.
Excellence Based on Curiosity
Behind Israel’s high-tech success was a country-wide initiative to venerate intellect and innovation. More and more the motivational force behind individual achievement, education was a survival mechanism for a fledgling nation at the start. That initiative has continued up to the present to a great extent in overseas research institutions which founded universities such as the Weizmann Institute of Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, all becoming world famous for their findings.
Weizmann Institute of Rehovot never appears in the world’s most influential research centers. This is where its researchers first came up with the solution to cancer, neuroscience, and even charted parts of the human genome. Nobel Laureate in Chemistry of 2009 Ada Yonath won the award for her research on the structure and function of the ribosome—a research work that was done at Weizmann.
Yonath was the first Israeli female Nobel laureate and created young women scientists throughout the country as her role model. “The only reason women in science are kept away,” she so beautifully described, “are society-imposed restrictions.”
Universities as Engines of Innovation
Israel’s universities are not necessarily advanced-university institutions. They’re factories for start-ups, walking increasingly often the fine line between business and science. The Technion, “Israel’s MIT,” begat scores of tech start-ups. Mobileye, whose autonomous-car technology company Intel bought for $15.3 billion in 2017, is an example. One of its co-founders, Professor Amnon Shashua, remains responsible for research into artificial intelligence and computer vision.
In the meantime, Hebrew University employs the world’s finest Nobel laureates, including Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on shaping the discipline of behavioral economics. Along with Amos Tversky, he revolutionized our knowledge of human decision and continues to influence decision-making from finance to public policy. Hebrew University is the leader in psychology and economics.
Preparing the Next Generation
Apart from Israeli academic opposition, there is emphasis placed on the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics on all school levels. Israel Sci-Tech Schools Network, for instance, teaches over 100,000 students and experiential learning in ecology, computer science, and robotics. The “Excellence in Science and Technology” state program spent enormous amounts of money on lower grades of education with the aim of catering to future multicultural scientists such as the Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox sectors.
Israel proper, in recent years, emerged as the world’s top science international partner, actually collaborating with CERN, with the European Space Agency, and with the majority of worldwide climatological research activity. Its greatest pride to boast is perhaps being an OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) full member so that one can benchmark student performance against the world’s best school systems.
Global Reach, Homegrown
Where foreign policy and science meet is the tale of Israeli genius working for the world. Whether one considers medical technology meant to act in times of emergencies for its practical application in relief missions following catastrophes, desalination devices shipped off to parched countries overseas, or agronomy science to provide food for Africa and render it food-secure, Israeli scientific capability is making the world sit up and take notice.
It is so well proven by late Prof. Aharon Katzir, father of electrochemistry and peace activist who never ever had even the slightest doubts that “science is the bridge over political divides”.
And then these efforts reach out and extend that bridge again, like “Scientists Without Borders,” an Israeli diaspora initiative of scientists building in the third world, dissemination and capacity building. It’s a definition Israel’s intellectual human capital is not an ivory tower—it’s an apologia for a lighthouse.
