11月9日，2004年诺贝尔化学奖得主阿龙·切哈诺沃教授将开讲首场“GTIIT-Technion科技领军人物系列讲座”。

以乳腺癌和前列腺癌为例，患有相似疾病的患者对类似疗法反应不同，他们的病程也大不相同。最近我们开始意识到，我们所认为的同一种疾病的潜在分子机制，在不同的人身上是不一样的。因此，乳腺癌或前列腺癌似乎可以根据其分子特征和引起突变的原因细分为不同类别。我们正在走出“一刀切”治疗多种疾病的旧时代，进入“个性化医疗”的新时代，根据患者的分子/突变谱来定制治疗方案。而这将伴随着复杂的生物伦理问题，大量人口的遗传信息将被获取，隐私保护变得至关重要，基因编辑也需严格监管。最近的新冠疫情进一步加剧了伦理问题，反疫苗运动便是其中一个例子。

阿龙·切哈诺沃教授1947年出生于以色列海法市，是以色列理工学院杰出教授。他于1971年获耶路撒冷市希伯莱大学理学硕士学位，1973年获该校医学博士学位。1973年至1976年间，他担任军队医生，随后继续在色列理工学院的医学院学习深造，并获得生物科学博士学位。在研究生阶段，他与阿夫拉姆·赫什科博士、美国费城福克斯蔡斯癌症中心的欧文·罗斯博士共同发现了泛素降解向目标蛋白质发出的共价连接信号，破译了接合的机理，描述其中的一般蛋白水解功能，并提出模型表明这一变体为下游蛋白酶的识别信号。随后在麻省理工大学哈维·罗迪西博士的带领下从事博士后研究，期间他继续研究泛素系统，并取得了其他一些重大发现。多年研究表明，泛素介导的蛋白降解途径在细胞变化过程中起到重要作用，系统的畸变也是导致很多病变的致病机理，包括恶性肿瘤和神经退行性疾病。因此，该系统已经成为药物开发的一个重要平台。

阿龙·切哈诺沃教授获得众多奖项和荣誉，包括2000年度Albert Lasker奖、2003年度以色列奖章，并与赫什博士和罗斯博士共同获得2004年度诺贝尔化学奖。同时，他在众多学术机构中均有任职，目前是以色列国家科学人文学院的成员，并在美国艺术与科学院、美国哲学协会、美国国家科学院、医学研究所任外籍研究员，也是梵蒂冈宗座科学院、中国科学院和俄罗斯科学院的外籍院士。

The first lecture this year is delivered by Nobel Prize Laureate (Chemistry 2004) Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, entitled The Road Between Patients and Curative Medical Technologies is Strewn with Bioethical Bumps: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond.

The realization that patients with apparently similar diseases – breast or prostate cancer, for example - respond differently to similar treatments and their disease course differ vastly, we have recently begun to understand that the underlying molecular mechanisms of what we thought is the same disease, are different in different people. Thus, breast or prostate cancers appear to be sub-divided to smaller distinct classes according to their molecular characteristics and the causing mutations. As a result, we are exiting now the era where the treatment of many diseases is "one size fits all", and enter a new era of "personalized medicine" where the treatment will be tailored according to the patient's

molecular/mutational profile. The era will be accompanied by complex bioethical problems. Among them is that genetic information of large populations will become available, protection of privacy will become an important issue, and gene editing will have to be tightly regulated. The ethical issues have been accentuated along the recent pandemic, and one example is of course the anti-vaccination movement.

Prof. Aaron Ciechanover was born in Haifa, Israel in 1947. He is a distinguished research professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. He received his M.Sc. (1971) and M.D. (1973) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He then completed his national service (1973-1976) as a military physician, after which he continued his studies and obtained his doctorate degree in biological sciences in the Faculty of Medicine in the Technion (D.Sc. 1982). At that time, Prof. Aaron Ciechanover was a graduate student under Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin A. Rose from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, USA, when they discovered that covalent attachment of ubiquitin to a target protein signals it for degradation. After deciphering the mechanism of conjugation, they described the general proteolytic functions of the system and proposed a model according to which this modification serves as a recognition signal for a specific downstream protease. As a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Harvey Lodish at the M.I.T., he continued his studies on the ubiquitin system and made additional important discoveries. Along the years it has become clear that ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis plays major roles in numerous cellular processes, and aberrations in the system underlie the pathogenetic mechanisms of many diseases, among them certain malignancies and neurodegenerative disorders. Consequently, the system has become an important platform for drug development.

Among the numerous prizes Ciechanover has received are the 2000 Albert Lasker Award, the 2003 Israel Prize, and the 2004 Nobel Prize (Chemistry; shared with Drs. Hershko and Rose). Among many academies, Ciechanover is member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Foreign Fellow), the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of the USA (Foreign Associate), the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; Foreign Member), and the Russian Academy of Sciences (Foreign Member).