Aaron Ciechanover

A physician by training, Dr. Aaron Ciechanover may once have dreamed of winning a Nobel Prize in Medicine, but he could scarcely have imagined his work would someday lead to a Nobel Prize in another discipline altogether. Yet, when the call from Stockholm came, it was to inform him that his work would be honored with the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. With research budgets a fraction of those found in larger countries, Dr. Ciechanover and his colleagues at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, had succeeded in answering a question that larger, more lavishly funded institutions had long neglected. The cells in our bodies contain as many as 100,000 different proteins, all continuously synthesizing and then breaking down again. Scientists in the world's leading research facilities have concentrated on the process by which proteins are synthesized in the cells, but the process of protein degradation was largely overlooked. In the early 1980s, Ciechanover and his associates uncovered the system that regulates the breakdown of proteins in the cells. Formerly mysterious biochemical processes can now be understood at the molecular level, knowledge that enhances our understanding of diseases such as cervical cancer and cystic fibrosis, and will enable the development of previously unimaginable medicines. Every year brings new discoveries derived from this fundamental breakthrough. Dr. Ciechanover discusses his groundbreaking research on the disintegration of proteins in this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2005 Summit in New York City.