How Does Israel Do It?
This question was asked recently
in “The
Hindu” – India’s equivalent of the Jerusalem Post – only with a
slightly larger circulation. The
reasons for the Jewish State’s scientific success are an enigma to most of the
world. How do they produce so many
Nobel laureates?
Israeli kids don’t start a degree course at eighteen and
waste their opportunity having a good time in the university bar. Those who are driving the success of the
Jewish State begin university life as mature, proactive individuals in their
early twenties already having had leadership and technology training and
experience in one of the most challenging organisation in the world – the Israeli
Defence Forces. Every week there is at
least one major discovery or innovation that emanates from one or other of
Israel’s eight top Universities.
Israel’s Technion is, in my opinion, a superb advertisement
for the Jewish State. Click on any of these three youtube video clips to see
how its scientists fine-tune the skills that will make the world a better
place. First, note the cream of
Israel’s tech culture currently busy building New York’s Technion
Cornell Innovation Institute. Watch how
the International Technion Computer
Engineering (TCE) conference attracted speakers from Alcatel-Lucent,
Cisco, IBM, Mellanox, Microsoft and from Cambridge, Princeton, UC Berkeley,
UCLA and UPenn universities. Finally,
this clip highlights how the Technion’s annual “Technobrain” challenge aptly
linked modern ingenuity with Israel’s historic past.
We now travel to Israel’s capital, where the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem recently unveiled "Innovators Way," a
permanent photo exhibition showcasing 27 university researchers behind the 7000
patents and numerous commercial products that have revolutionized the fields of
health, safety, environment, agriculture, computer science and nutrition. Moving onto Tel Aviv, Bar Ilan
University welcomed 30 male and female undergraduate science majors
from Yeshiva University in New York, who will spend seven weeks of the summer
carrying out their research in Bar Ilan's state-of-the-art laboratories. It was quite apt therefore that the magazine
Scientific American featured 28-year-old Israeli physicist Eldad
Kepten in its “30 under 30” list of future possible Nobel
Laureates. Kepten obtained his first
degree at the Hebrew U and is currently embarking on a PhD at Bar Ilan. His speciality? The stochastic dynamics of
chromatin (DNA) in the cellular nucleus with advanced microscopy and single
particle tracking. Good luck!
The younger members of Israeli society have also been
demonstrating their potential recently.
We may not have won any medals at the London Olympics, but at the 2012 Maths
Olympiad in Argentina, Israel’s youth team won five medals including
three silvers, a bronze and one special citation. Then at the Physics
Olympiad in Estonia, Israeli kids won two silvers and three bronze
medals. And at the Chemistry Olympiad in
Washington the four-person team took home one silver medal and three
bronzes. Also in Washington, six
teenagers from Yeroham in the Negev desert won $5,000 in the FLL Global Innovation
competition for youth scientists by designing a “stick” that keeps the
contents of a picnic basket cool. Breaking the stick causes chemicals to mix
and freeze.
When these budding entrepreneurs are ready to put their
ideas into commercial ventures they will be helped by equally innovative
Government support, such as Tel Aviv’s first of its kind Patents
Exhibition. It will place
10,000 Israeli and foreign inventors, investors, patent attorneys, mechanical
engineers and computer programmers in the same room in order
to turn good ideas into actual products.
So what recent innovations have Israelis been
producing? How about perfect
chips? Israeli
technology is responsible for the Deep
Ultra Violet (DUP) lasers that US based Applied Materials Inc will use
to speed up the manufacturing of the world’s microprocessors. And Tel Aviv University doctorate student
Elad Mentovich has designed a molecular
memory transistor called C60, based on carbon molecules that can be as
small as one nanometer – far too small to see.
But it was failure to see runway debris that caused the crash of
an Air France Concorde in July 2000.
This inspired the Israeli company Xsight to develop FODetect, which uses
hybrid radar and electro optical technology to detect foreign
objects on runways.
But many Israelis (like me) believe that there is yet
another factor responsible for the phenomenal success of the Jewish State. How has this tiny country survived against
all odds to reach this stage? To win
existential wars, avoid world financial chaos, discover vast energy reserves
whilst simultaneously developing the ability to build a spacecraft to land on
the Moon and detect the first stars
formed when the universe was in its infancy?
The answer is out there, if you look for it.
Michael Ordman writes a weekly newsletter containing Good
News stories about Israel.
To subscribe, email a request to michael.goodnewsisrael@gmail.com
