Aaron Ciechanover

Origins and early life

Aaron Ciechanover was born in Haifa on 1 October 1947 into a Jewish family that had come to the country from Poland in the 1920s: his mother Bluma Lubashevsky taught English, his father Yitzhak worked in a law office. He studied medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the army's academic reserve scheme, took a master's degree in 1971 and qualified in 1974, then completed a doctorate in biochemistry at the Technion in Haifa in 1981 before a postdoctoral stay with Harvey Lodish at MIT.

Work and career

Cells were known to build proteins and known to break them down, but the breaking down was taken for passive housekeeping, the work of digestive enzymes. With Avram Hershko at the Technion, and with Irwin Rose in Philadelphia, Ciechanover found the opposite: destruction is deliberate, addressed and paid for. A small protein called ubiquitin is fastened to the protein that must go, in a chain built by enzymes acting in turn, and that chain is the address label read by the cell's shredder, which takes the marked molecule apart.

The cell spends ATP to do it, and that expenditure is what buys the precision. Ubiquitin tagging governs the cell cycle, DNA repair and the immune response, and drugs now act on the pathway against cancer. Ciechanover shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, becoming one of Israel's first laureates in science. He is a distinguished research professor at the Technion's Rappaport faculty of medicine.