An event to remember

400 outstanding high school students arrived at Madatech on May 20th to attend two exceptional events.



First, students met personally with three esteemed Nobel Laureate; Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, Israeli Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, 2004, Prof. Jean-Marie Pierre Lehn, French Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, 1987 and Prof. R. Timothy (Tim) Hunt, Britain's Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine, 2001.The Laureates participated in an open and informal interaction with students, relating their research and discussing their personal experience as Noble Prize winners.
On stage left to right: Prof. Chiechanover, Prof. Hunt, Prof. Lehn, Dr. Ronen mir Director of Madatech





Moreover, 2008 is the year of the polar. Hence, from May 15-24, science centers all over the world hosted students, who  participated globally in the Albedo Experiment, initiated through a joint venture of NASA and IGLO. NASA satellitesl flew overhead and capture images of mock “ice caps” created by local students at the science centers. The satellites then measured the reflectivity of these mock "ice caps", photographed them and measured their reflectivity versus that of the sites with no "ice caps." Science centers took their own Albedo measurements and will compare them to NASA's findings.


See us also on The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) website  homepage


In Person

Meet the Nobel Laureate, as they are presented in the photographs at the Nobel Faces Exhibition:

Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, Israeli Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, 2004

Professor Ciechanover was born in Haifa in 1947. He completed his M.D. at the Hadassah Hebrew University School of Medicine prior to his IDF service; He started engaging in Biochemistry research while he was studying for his Ph.D. under Professor Hershko, in the Technion Institute. The period in which they worked together from 1977-1981, led them to breakthrough discoveries of ubiquitin-related protein degeneration (The "Ubiquitin System"), identifying the staged process in cells to be marked for destruction - as published in 1978 and pursued in the 1980s., in Professor Irwin Rose's (USA) Lab. at the Philadelphia Cancer research institution



Prof. R. Timothy (Tim) Hunt, Britain's Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine, 2001

Born in 1943, at the age of 14, he discovered his love for Chemistry in particular, largely because his teacher, Colonel Simmons. Later on, biology again came to the fore thanks to his teacher, Terence Doherty. In college, he decided to become a biochemist and started his scientific career in 1964 in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge, under the supervision of Asher Korner, who encouraged a great deal of freedom among his students to work on any aspect they chose of DNA, RNA or protein synthesis. From there, the path to investigating the cell cycle was inevitable. Prof. Tim Hunt was rewarded for identifying, cloning and characterizing with genetic and molecular methods, one of the key regulators of the cell cycle.


Prof. Jean-Marie Pierre Lehn, French Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, 1987

Born in 1939, he studied natural sciences, physics and chemistry and researched in the field of organic chemistry. Awarded for the development and application of molecules with highly selective structure specific interaction, i.e. molecules that can "recognize" each other and choose with which other molecules they will form complexes. He studied chemical and physical properties of these complexes and have elucidated the factors that determine the ability of the molecules to recognize each other and fit into one another. He has thus laid the foundation for the active interdisciplinary area of research within chemistry that has now come to be termed host-guest chemistry or supramolecular chemistry.