Month: November 2011

For his continuing activities in strengthening ties between Israeli and German scientists

All the speakers at the ceremony noted the good but delicate relations between Germany and Israel and stressed the importance of the language of science as a bridge and trust builder. Technion President, Prof. Peretz Lavie, said that the Technion was conceptualized at the University of Berlin and set up by German born Jewish scientists. “The good relations were cut off brutally and horribly in World War II,” he said. “Since then, the complex relations between our two states have been recovering, and this requires dedicated people like Prof. Apeloig who contribute continuously to the improvement of these relations. The language which Prof. Apeloig has chosen is the language of science.”

Ambassador Michaelis said that this is the first time that he is granting the award in Israel. “The scientific cooperation between Germany and Israel is great and deep,” he emphasized. “You, Prof. Apeloig, are one of the most important contributors to this cooperation.”

The Mayor of Haifa, Attorney Yona Yahav, said that his city has close relations with five cities in Germany.

Prof. Apeloig expressed his thanks for receiving the award. He said it was not easy for him when he began working in cooperation with German scientists. “Both Zipi, my wife, and myself come from families of Holocaust survivors. I was born in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, where my family had fled from Poland. I grew up with harsh feelings towards Germany. This wasn’t a promising prologue to my stay in Germany for my post-doctorate, where I went when I followed my supervisor from Princeton. The German scientists showed me another side of Germany and since then I have been to Germany many times, German scientists have visited the Technion many times, I made friendswith many of them, and some have become lifelong friends. I believe very strongly that science can serve as a bridge of friendship between nations.”

Prof. Apeloig has visited Germany many times with his students for conferences, with the support of the Minerva Foundation. One of these visits was to, a charming conference site belonging to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. 65 people attended the meeting, and of these, 18 were scientists and the remainder, chemistry and physics students, half from Germany and half from Israel. These meetings, which combine science, study workshops and social events, are very important. About this meeting, Prof. Apeloig said: “This was an important, interesting and exciting event, which will contribute to the strengthening of the cooperation between Israeli and German scientists and the creation of a bridge between future scientists in both countries.”

There are 11 Minvera Centers in the Technion and within this framework Prof. Appeloig, together with Prof. Sason Shaik of the Hebrew University, established “The Lise Meitner-Minerva Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry.”

The University of Berlin previously awarded Prof. Apeloig an “Honorary Doctorate” degree – making him the first Israeli to be presented with this distinguished honorary degree by this university, where the Technion in Haifa was conceptualized more than a hundred years ago. The heads of the university said then that Prof. Apeloig received the honorary doctorate for his important scientific achievements in the research of chemistry of organosilicon complexes, and emphasized his great contribution to the advancement of scientific relations with German scientists.

Above: Prof. Yitzhak Apeloig (on the left) receiving the award from the German ambassador to Israel, Andreas Michalis. Photo by: Yoav Bechar, Technion photographer

The whole of the Technion celebrated last weekend with Nobel laureate, Distinguished Prof. Danny Shechtman, who leaves next week for Stockholm for the award ceremony. “Our delight is not just because one of our own won the world’s most esteemed prize but, rather, because scientific truth won,” said Technion President, Prof. Peretz Lavie.

The Swedish ambassador to Israel, Elinor Hammarskjöld, in her talk also spoke of Prof. Shechtman’s firm stand for many years against the opinion of the entire scientific world regarding his discovery. “We admire not only the discovery of quasicrystals, but also your scientific way,” she told the Nobel laureate.

Haifa Mayor, Yona Yahav (Attorney), made Prof. Shechtman an honorary citizen of Haifa. “The good news is that the decision was a unanimous one by the City Council. The not-so-good news is that the decision does not exempt you from having to pay city taxes,” said the Mayor to the laughing listeners.

The Nobel winner for Chemistry in 2004, Distinguished Prof. Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, said to Prof. Danny Shechtman: “Welcome to the club. Today you are joining an exceptional group.” Regarding the winning of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry thus far by four Israeli scientists (Professors Avram Hershko, Ada Yonat, Danny Shechtman and himself), Prof. Ciechanover said, “Chemistry today is a much broader concept than the narrow one that up to now has been generally recognized.”

Prof. Shechtman thanked the large audience: “I usually do not get emotional,” he said. “This evening I am overwhelmed. I feel a lot of warmth here. I feel good standing next to the lectern. Here is where I began teaching the course I founded 25 years ago in order to encourage technological entrepreneurship in the state of Israel. I am a Zionist and I want this country to be a good place to live. From here I call for good education for everyone because without good education there will be no revitalization.”

He revealed that he and Mayor Yona Yahav have decided to promote an initiative for scientific education for preschool children in Haifa. “I will do all I can to promote education in the state of Israel,” he promised.

The ceremony moderator was the Dean of the Faculty of Materials Engineering at the Technion, Prof. Wayne Kaplan.

In the picture: Prof. Shechtman thanking his well-wishers. On the left – Prof. Peretz Lavie, Technion President. Photography by: Shlomo Shoham, Technion Spokesman.

During the 17^th Annual Seminar on Patient-Physician Relations held by the Technion’s Faculty of Medicine:

“Transgender patients are still met with hostility, belittlement and vast ignorance by the medical establishment.” Thus said researchers during the 17^th Annual Prof. Aaron Valero Memorial Seminar on Patient-Physician Relations. Prof. Aaron Valero was one of the founders of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion.

The seminar, which took place in the Faculty of Medicine, focused on a very unique community – people who turn to psychiatrists and surgeons despite being of sound mind and body. This is the community of transgender people – persons born into bodies that are not the “right body” for them. “Nature betrayed us,” in the words of Paola, a young transgender woman who spoke to the audience about her experiences and her coping with the medical system.

 “We as doctors must understand who these people are, what their feelings are and what their expectations from us are,” said the moderator, Dr. Rabinovitch. “In contrast to a homosexual, who can begin to live his new life the moment he admits to his orientation or at the moment when he “comes out of the closet”, a transgender person needs medical assistance in realizing the physical change in his body to which he aspires. And we, physicians, do not always know how to “deal” with him, how to talk to him; is it a him or a her?”

Nora Greenberg, a gender specialist who consults to the transgender community, said that these people experience gender incongruence given that their gender identity does not match their bodies and their sexual organs. “This gap causes great distress, which impacts on the person’s life and prevents him from living a full life. The only way to relieve this distress is to expose the real gender emotions and live according to them. Since the body is an important part of their identity experience, and primarily their sexual identity experience, it is no wonder that many transgender people want to change it in order to acquire the characteristics of the gender with which they identify. To do this they require physicians and medicine.”

Ms. Greenberg said that it is very important that the physician address his transgender patient in language that matches the patient’s independent gender designation. “Ignoring the patient’s independent designation positions the physician and the patient on two sides of a power divide. This is an aggressive action that negates not only the patient’s gender identification feelings, but also destroys any chance for a therapeutic relationship based on mutual respect and trust. The person coming to us is someone who is uncomfortable in his present body – his body is essentially his problem. Therefore, as those who are going to treat this body and change it, we must be very sensitive in our discussions with the patient and the treatment itself. First of all, we must ask him which gender we should use to address him (male/female), and respect his answer. We must talk to the person – and not to his present body.”

Following the lecture by Ms. Greenberg, A., a young medical student who has just finished his sixth year of studies, came up to speak. He told his life story. “I have an older sister and a younger sister and we were always called “the girls.” This really bothered me but I did not understand why. In school a soccer club opened but the coach wouldn’t allow me to play – ‘it’s only for boys’, he said. At the age of 16, when my girlfriends talked about setting up a home, I felt somewhat uncomfortable. They didn’t understand why, and in reality, I also didn’t understand.

 “Today I am 30 years old. At the age of 23 I heard for the first time the term transgender from a transgender person. Suddenly someone put into words what I had been feeling all my life – that I am not in the right body. It is immensely lonely to live without understanding, without having the words to describe what you feel, without being able to explain. This meeting changed everything.

 “Today it is clear to me who I am. I did not need a doctor to agree with this diagnosis. But this discovery was just the beginning of the way. I gradually told my friends and family, and after the fact, it was clear that it would have been a lot easier for them to accept an announcement that I had cancer. The dissonance, the gap between my wonderful self-discovery and society’s reaction, was not easy.”

 “And then – the medical procedures: a meeting with my family doctor, a psychiatrist, an endocrinologist. The surgical procedure. These meetings were very difficult – each doctor, each nurse and each medical secretary were sure that it was ok for them to ask every kind of question, invasive as it may be. “How did your parents react? How does your girlfriend feel about the surgery?” – these are questions that would never be asked in any other patient-medical staff encounter. There were also wonderful physicians along the way, but the antagonism, the ignorance and the voyeurism were very hard. These people did not understand how sensitive we are to our body – because it is our problem. If we were innocent souls, without bodies, we wouldn’t have any problem.”

 “The medical community, in general, relates to these kinds of people as a curiosity,” said Ms. Greenberg. Correct relations between patients and their doctors require an entirely different kind of connection, the center of which is respect for the person – even if this is the middle of the nightshift in the Emergency Department. These people are not ill and are not disturbed – they come to us because they are suffering a dissonance (a gap) between their bodies and their identity. Our job is to help them on the physical level, without harming them.

 “The present definition of the ‘problem’ of these people is Gender Identity Disorder,” said Ms. Greenberg. “I am happy to say that in the soon-to-appear next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, the definition will be changed to Gender Dysphoria, with the definition of the disorder relating to the distress caused by the lack of sexual congruence, and not to the cross-gender gender identification itself.

 “Transgender people have suffered a lot from the pathologization of their identity. Over the past few years, we are seeing a growing trend of de- pathologization, one of whose expressions is the above mentioned change in the DSM. In the past, medicine has tried to oversee the treatment of these people through conservative and rigid treatment models into which patients were supposed to fit. In the last few years, with the establishment of the transgender model with its many facets, a more open treatment approach has become accepted, with many options, and with the treatment being offered changing from patient to patient in response to their needs.

 “In general, the historical process is moving in a positive direction: the perception whereby a person must prove that he is an ‘authentic’ transgender person is changing into an understanding that gender identification is not dichotomous (male or female, without any state of in-between) but rather a continuum with, at one end, pure femininity and at the other end, pure masculinity. No real person exists at either of these two extremes – we are all somewhere in between.

“Despite these positive developments, transgender patients still face hostility, belittlement and immense ignorance on the part of the medical establishment. The basic problem is the existing gender conformity, and the fact that most physicians belong to the ruling majority, that is, the cisgender population – people who are not transgender and identify with the gender into which they were born. Like many of the cisgender population, doctors also suffer largely from transphobia – hatred, disgust and fear of transgender persons or abound with the cis-normative approach, that is, the belief that the cisgender identity is natural, healthy and better than transgenderism and every divergence from it is a type of deviation.

“The stage most necessary on the way to change is the understanding by every doctor that he or she belongs to a social system. There is no purely individual person. Therefore, if the doctor belongs to the ruling group, the cisgender group, he must be aware of this, because his behavior is affected by this affiliation. In the next stage, he must be prepared to waive his power as a cisgender person, not his power and knowledge as a doctor – these are essential – but his feelings of superiority, of which he is usually unaware, which do not enable him to understand the patient as a whole and real person.”

In addition to Nora Greenberg and A., another two transgender people who underwent surgery to change gender and life their lives in line with the feelings of their authentic gender identity spoke: Paola, a psychology graduate, and Shamai, a rabbi and social activist, told the audience about their experiences with doctors.

The late Prof. Aaron Valero, a founder of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, was born in Jerusalem in 1913 and died 11 years ago. After completing his studies at Gymnasia Yerushalyim (1932), he went to Birmingham, England to study medicine. With the outbreak of World War II he returned to Israel and then served with the British Army in the Persian Gulf. At the end of the war he returned to Israel, moved to Haifa and worked at Poriya Hospital and Rambam Hospital where he set up the Department of Internal Medicine.

Following the decision to establish a medical school at the Technion, Prof. Valero founded the first course “Introduction to Internal Medicine – Physical Diagnosis”, and he was the first to teach the course in reading ECGs. Prof. Rosalie Bar said that Prof. Valero “was an outstanding doctor, an exceptional clinician, introverted and modest, who ran his department primarily by being a role model. He was an exemplar of gentlemanly patient-physician relations, as he had been taught in Birmingham.”

Researchers from the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion and from Utrecht University in the Netherlands showed that chemotherapy drugs, beyond their ability to kill tumor cells, are also able to increase the risk of a metastic process in mice. A number of different mechanisms have been suggested in order to explain the metastic process after chemotherapy and it may be that these mechanisms coexist. Dr. Yuval Shaked of the Technion and Prof. Emile Voest of Utrecht University published their findings in the scientific journal, Cancer Research.

Researchers in Dr. Yuval Shaked’s laboratory have been working for several years on trying to understand how cancer cells successfully escape conventional therapy and why they can develop resistance to different types of therapies. In opposition to other studies in the field, which generally concentrate on the ability of cancer cells  to develop resistance to therapy, this lab focuses on a different area: the working hypothesis is that in addition to changes initiated in the cancer cells following therapy, other cells in the host – the human body – also change, and are liable, in effect, to contribute to tumor growth, and the development of resistance to treatment. In other words, the tumor “calls” for help following treatment and the host cells respond to this call.

In practice, this group previously showed that the process of new blood vessel creation in cancer – a critical process in tumor development – becomes aggressive specifically after anti-cancer treatment, e.g., after chemotherapy. The creation of new blood vessels during cancer growth is a well-known process but in earlier research by this group, they found that the generation of blood vessels in cancer becomes significant and intensive after different chemotherapy treatments. As a result, this can explain, at least in part,  the success of therapies that incapacitate new blood vessels only when combined with different chemotherapy treatments but not when administered alone. This work, which was published a number of years ago in the scientific journal Cancer Cell, motivated Dr. Shaked’s lab to continue investigating the link between anti-cancer treatment and the way cancer cells respond during different stages of therapy – the response requires the assistance of various cells found in the host.

Recently, two papers were published in Cancer Research by two separate teams of researchers – one by the Technion (Dr. Yuval Shaked) and the second by a team from Utrecht University (Prof. Emile Voest). The papers showed that chemotherapy drugs, asides from their ability to kill tumor cells, are also able to increase the risk of metastatic spread in mice. A number of different mechanisms have been suggested for explaining the metastatic spread process following chemotherapy, and it is likely that these mechanisms coexist.

Dr. Svetlana Gingis-Velitski,  the leading researcher in the Technion’s team, demonstrated that plasma from mice primed with chemotherapy drugs cause cancer cells to undergo a process similar to that of metastatic cells. She found that one reason for this phenomenon was the activation of different bone marrow cells that colonize the treated  tumor and secrete enzymes that break up the extracellular matrix, and thereby contribute to the invasiveness of cancer cells and their movement within the tissue until they reach different areas, in other words, become metastases. When she used materials or drugs that neutralized these enzymes, the chemotherapy treatment did not cause metastasis spread.

These findings suggest that chemotherapy has negative side effects not only in terms of its toxicity but that it is even able to increase the factors contributing to processes in the host that bring about a significant contribution to the tumors, and it is very likely that these phenomena contribute to the decrease in effectiveness of chemotherapy in patients. In different clinical cases it was found that sometimes anti-cancer drug therapy does indeed help in significantly reducing the size of the primary tumor, but for some reason, patients’ survival is not extended despite the use of the effective therapy. Possibly, the secretions of various factors by the host, as described in the above papers, contribute to the metastic process that harms the patient and does not extend their survival.

Dr. Yuval Shaked, the research supervisor and the laboratory head, said that “if we find the factors that are secreted by the host and that contribute to the growth of metastases after chemotherapy, then we will have new tools and new cancer targets that are yet to be identified. Blocking these factors in combination with conventional therapy, i.e., chemotherapy, is liable to significantly increase the success of this treatment.”

Dr. John Ebos of the Department of Medicine at Roosevelt Park Cancer Institute agrees that the findings of the two groups of researchers are very important and that they explain why the efficacy of chemotherapy is limited in certain patients and are, therefore, important in helping to find out how to improve the effectiveness of this treatment.

Prof. Sara Courtneidge of the Medical Research Institute in Stanford-Barnham said: “I hope that these papers encourage additional research that will investigate the mechanisms creating metastatic tumor growth that are the results of chemotherapy and consider integrated treatment in light of these mechanisms, because physicians will not stop using chemotherapy.”

Actually, Dr. Shaked’s laboratory, in combination with a number of hospitals in the country and around the world, primarily Rambam Medical Center in Haifa and the Director of Oncology, Prof. Abraham Kuten, HaEmek Medical Center in Afula (Dr. David Loven), as well as the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, Italy (Prof. Francesco Bertolini) are working together in order to investigate whether these worrisome findings in mice also appear prominently in clinical practice and if so, whether these factors can be used to predict which patients will benefit from  what kind of chemotherapy.

Additionally, students, post-doctoral fellows, and employees in Dr. Shaked’s lab – Dr. Ella Fremder, Tali Voloshin, Rotem Bril, Dror Alishekevitz, Michal Munster, Liat Benayoun, and Valeria Miller – are all working hard today on other host components that are likely to be involved in the above mentioned findings. “We are in the midst of a process of establishing a consortium to continue the research on the cancerous effects of chemotherapy drugs and to identify new treatment targets,” says Dr. Shaked. “The consortium at the moment includes academic teams and private companies from Sweden, Greece, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and, of course, Israel.”

The Technion and Monash University of Australia have launched a series of joint lectures, facilitated by the installation of advanced multimedia equipment by TNN Telecom. Monash University is the largest university in the southern hemisphere.

The advanced multimedia system, a gift from the Technion Society of Australia, has been set up in a lecture room in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management. The lecture series is focused on materials engineering and the use of different materials in aeronautics, and on systems engineering and information systems.

With the opening of the new academic year, the first lecture was given by Prof. Dov Dori, on conceptual modeling and managing systems complexity. The lecturer stood in front of his Israeli class and on screens in front of him saw his Australian class. Both the Israeli students and the Australian students saw him standing and lecturing to them and their interaction was that of a regular classroom in which all the students are present. The sound and picture quality were excellent. The system that had been installed includes a digital video system, an advanced sound system and a digital presentation system. A unique touch screen is installed in the lecturer’s stand and the lecturer can draw on this screen using an electronic pen. What he or she draws is recorded and transmitted to all the students as a supplement to the lecture.

The Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management in the Technion, Prof. Boaz Golany, said that the Technion and the Faculty that he heads intend to strengthen their relations with Monash University and that the cutting-edge equipment opens a wealth of new opportunities and shortens the great geographic distance.

Above: Prof. Golany (on the right) and Prof. Dori (on the left) launching the lecture series, in front of lecturers and students at Monash University. Photo by: Yoav Bechar, Technion Spokesman