Aaron-Ciechanover, Avram-Hershko, Irwin-Rose(Left to Right)

Many a Jew or Israeli have showed their life-born talent in science, which is prominently manifested in the field of chemistry in the early 21st century. In 2004, two Israelis plus an American-Jew shared the Nobel Chemistry Prize of that year, and exactly the same situation appears again in just nine years in 2013. Additionally, there are two more Jewish-Israelis, Ada-Yonate and Dan-Schetman who were awarded with the prize in 2009 and 2011 respectively; that is to say, there has been 6 Israeli Nobel Chemistry Prize winners in just one decade.

On December 10, 2004, Carl XVI Gustaf, the king of Sweden, handed the medals of Nobel Chemistry Prize to Israeli bio-chemists Aaron-Ciechanover, Avram-Hershko and American bio-chemist Irwin-Rose. They were awarded with this special honor for “the discovery of ubiquit-mediated protein-degradation.

Aaron-Ciechanover, whose parents were both from Poland, immigrating to the British Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s. In 1947, the Ciechanover couple gave birth to their second baby Aaron in Haifa, a port city in the north of the territory. Aaron-Ciechanover's family attached huge attention to the youngers' education, his big brother gave him a micro-scope as gift on his eleventh birthday, encouraging him to dedicated to the career of science. After his high school years, Aaron-Ciechanover headed to Jerusalem and obtained his bachelor and master degrees form the Hadassah Medical School under the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; he turned back to Haifa in 1976 and joined Avram-Hershko’s lab in the faculty of medicine in Technion, where he became a doctor in bio-chemistry five years later.

After that Aaron-Ciechanover flew to America. He stayed in the MIT for three years to finish his post-doctoral studies. In 1984 Aaron-Ciechanover headed back to Haifa again and has been working in the Technion since then. He is an “distinguished research professor” of the Technion. Meanwhile, Aaron-Ciechanover is also a member of Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a foreign associate of United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2011, Aaron-Ciechanover engaged as the concurrent dean of the Nanjing Biomedical Research Institute of Nanjing University; in 2013 Aaron-Ciechanover became a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The other Israeli biochemist who shared this honor with Aaron-Ciechanover was his mentor, Avram-Hershko. Avram-Hershko is originally from Hungary, he was born in the town of Karcag in 1937. His father was forced to join the army against the USSR by the Hungarian fascism reign during the second world war,and was prisoned by the Soviet Red Army later. Along with his mother and brother, Avram-Hershko who was a child then was put into the concentration camp by the German Nazis. Fortunately, the whole family managed to steer away from the Shoah and even reunited after the war. In 1950, they resettled in Jerusalem.

Avram-Hershko was a very intelligent student who gained good marks in almost every single subject. However, being influenced by his big brother who chose to become a doctor, Avram-Hershko finally made the same decision. He was enrolled to the Hadassah Medical School in 1956 and graduated as a MD-PhD in 1969.At the same year he went to the University of California and started his post-doctoral career. He turned back to Technion in Haifa in 1971 and joined the newly established faculty of medicine. Here Avram-Hershko set his lab in a two-story building with humble conditions and met with Aaron-Ciechanover, his outstanding student; later the pair started the cooperation with Irwin Rose, an American Jewish biochemist who had also showed great interest in the research of protein-degradation. According to their work, it was found that ubiquitin plays a vital role in “tagging” the useless protein within the human body for the degradation or “cleaning” of the waste, and diseases like cancer might be caused if such process suffers disturbance.

Similar to Aaron-Ciechanover, Avram-Hershko is also an old friend of China and Chinese people. In 2011 Avram-Hershko joined the Chinese Academy of Scineces as a foreign associate,and received the Chinese Government’s Friendship Award for his devotion in “cultivation of senior scientific personnel and promotion of the international academic communications among Chinese scientists” the same year.

Though was born and brought up in the USA, the blood flows through Irwin-Rose’s vein is the same as that of his two partners. In 1926 Irwin-Rose was born into a secular Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. His parents made a living from a floor shop. He suspended his campus life as a freshman and put on the United States Navy‘s uniform in the WWII. Then he came to the University of Chicago when the peace was back and earned his degrees of all levels. The first stop after Irwin-Rose’s graduation was the faculty of medicine under the Yale University. In 1963 he went to the Fox Chase Cancer Center in the Philadelphia. Here he met with Aaron-Ciechanover and Avram-Hershko who came as visiting scholars at the end of 1970s. The threesome cooperated with each other over the lengthy and rigorous course of the protein-degradation research. Thanks to their work, the process through which the useless and waste protein is treated within the human body was unveiled, that is really helpful to the understand of how does the immune system work and even to the acceleration of cancer treatment.

Irwin-Rose passed away at the age of 89 in his own house in Massachusetts in 2015.

Aaron-Ciehanover and Avram-Hershko are the very first Israeli  who were awarded with Nobel Prize in the fields of science. They have been seen as national heroes by the country and the people.