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Aaron Ciechanover (אהרן צ'חנובר; born October 1, 1947) is an Israeli biologist, who won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for characterizing the method that cells use to degrade and recycle proteins using ubiquitin.


Biography

Ciechanover was born in Haifa, British mandate of Palestine, a year before the establishment of the State of Israel. He is the son of Bluma (Lubashevsky), a teacher of English, and Yitzhak Ciechanover, an office worker. His family had immigrated from Poland before the Second World War.

He earned a master's degree in science in 1971 and graduated from Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem in 1974. He received his doctorate in biochemistry in 1982 from the Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology), in Haifa. He is currently a Technion Distinguished Research Professor in the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute at the Technion.

Ciechanover is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and is a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

In 2005, he was voted the co-31st-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis. As one of Israel's first Nobel Laureates in Science, he is honored in playing a central role in the history of the State of Israel and in the History of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.


Publications

- Ciechanover, A., Hod, Y. and Hershko, A. (1978). A Heat-stable Polypeptide Component of an ATP-dependent Proteolytic System from Reticulocytes. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 81, 1100–1105.
- Ciechanover, A., Heller, H., Elias, S., Haas, A.L. and Hershko, A. (1980). ATP-dependent Conjugation of Reticulocyte Proteins with the Polypeptide Required for Protein Degradation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 77, 1365–1368.
- Hershko, A. and Ciechanover, A. (1982). Mechanisms of intracellular protein breakdown. Annu. Rev. Biochem. 51, 335–364.


Awards

- In 2000, Ciechanover received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.
- In 2003, he was awarded the Israel Prize, for biology.
- in 2004, he was awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose, of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. The ubiquitin-proteasome pathway has a critical role in maintaining the homeostasis of cells and is believed to be involved in the development and progression of diseases such as: cancer, muscular and neurological diseases, immune and inflammatory responses.