- If I asked you to guess
which countries had the second highest number
of Nobel Prizes in Chemistry
for the past two decades, which would you pick?
Maybe Germany, France, (horn buzzing),
it's Israel and Japan.
12 Israelis have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.
Six of those Israelis won the Prize for chemistry.
Two got the Prize in economics,
one Israeli author won the literature Prize,
and over the years, three have been awarded
the Peace Prize for negotiating certain agreements,
with mixed results as we'll see.
(upbeat music)
Let's start with the very first Israeli
to win a Nobel Prize, Shai Agnon,
who won the Prize for literature in 1966.
He shared it with German-Jewish-Swedish poet,
named Nelly Sachs,
but we'll be focusing on Agnon,
since this video is specifically about Israelis.
Agnon was born in 1888 in an area of Eastern Europe
on the modern border of Poland and Ukraine.
His parents were wealthy
and he was educated in both Jewish tradition
and European culture.
Agnon had been writing since the age of 15,
but in 1924, his manuscripts
and books were destroyed in a house fire,
a devastating loss for him.
The fire clearly remained on his mind,
and he often made references to it
in some of his later stories.
In 1966, almost two decades after the Nobel Committee
first considered Agnon for the Literature Prize,
they decided to award it to him,
along with Sachs.
He remains the only Israeli
to ever win the Prize for Literature,
but when it comes to winning Nobels in general,
the country was just getting started.
The next Israeli to win a Nobel Prize
was prime minister Menachem Begin
who shared the 1978 Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat,
then president of Egypt.
They were awarded the Prize
for the peace agreement they negotiated earlier that year.
Now Begin was something of a controversial figure
in Middle Eastern politics,
partly because of his background
as a leader of the Irgun paramilitary group
before the State of Israel was established.
When he arrived in Oslo to receive the award,
hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators organized protests
to the point the ceremony had to be moved elsewhere.
Despite the controversy surrounding Begin though,
he accomplished a lot
over the course of his political career.
But, we have a whole separate episode about him
that you can check out
if you're interested in learning more.
He and Sadat were awarded the Prize
because of the peace agreements they made at Camp David
earlier in 1978.
Egypt and Israel had been enemies
ever since the State of Israel was established.
And the Camp David Accords transformed that
into a much friendlier relationship
that continues to this day.
After Begin, it was 16 years
before another Israeli won a Nobel
and when they did, it was the Peace Prize yet again.
In 1994, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
along with Shimon Peres who was the foreign minister
at the time, shared the Peace Prize
with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Like Begin and Sadat,
the reason was a set of peace agreements they negotiated,
but this time, although they didn't know it yet,
the agreements were doomed to failure.
The fact that these three shared the Peace Prize
was pretty ironic
because none of them actually liked each other.
Even Rabin and Peres who worked together closely
for many years, were famous for their rocky relationship.
Arafat meanwhile had been heavily involved
in terrorist attacks against Israel
but in 1993, the three of them sat down
to negotiate the Oslo Accords,
a series of agreements that were meant to establish peace
between Israel and the Palestinian people.
But even in 1993, the award was very controversial.
A lot of people took issue with Arafat sharing it
since he'd been so involved in terrorism.
So that Prize didn't go so well,
but then came the Prizes in the sciences.
Israel's first Nobel Prize in the sciences
was in 2002, but it wasn't chemistry yet.
Daniel Kahneman shared the Prize in Economic Sciences
with American economist Vernon Smith.
Ever wish you could predict someone else's decisions?
Well that's what Kahneman figured out how to do
in certain contexts.
It's called Prospect Theory.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1934,
he actually earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees
in psychology, not economics.
But he was always interested
in how intuition affects the choices we make,
and in the 1970s he started thinking about
how to apply psychology to economic decisions.
Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky
discovered a major flaw in the theories others
had already come up with.
They assumed that people chose rationally,
but they don't.
Tversky died in 1996, so he wasn't eligible
for the Nobel Prize when Kahneman was awarded it in 2002.
The next Israelis to win a Nobel Prize
did it only two years later,
when Aaron Ciechanover and Avran Hershko
shared the 2004 Prize in Chemistry
with their American colleague, Irwin Rose.
And when it comes to Chemistry Prizes,
this was the first of many.
This Prize was awarded for the three chemists' work
on how proteins in cells are broken down.
In the 1970s, they discovered a system that identifies
which proteins need to be broken down
and tells the cell when and where to do it.
Once we discovered this new system,
scientists realized it's often a key part
of how cancer develops.
And ever since then,
researchers have been using this discovery
to develop more targeted treatments for certain cancers.
For example, in 2003, regulators in the US
approved a drug that uses this theory
to treat multiple myeloma, a type of bone marrow cancer.
The following year, 2005,
saw another Israeli win a Nobel Prize.
But this time, it was back to economics,
with Israeli mathematician Robert Auman
sharing the Prize with American economist Thomas Schelling.
Auman focused on game theory, the study of the strategies
people use when someone else's choices
also affect the outcome.
Probably the most famous example of game theory
is a game show called "Golden Balls"
where you and a partner have to each decide
whether you want to split the jackpot
or steal it all for yourself.
The mathematics behind Auman's research
can get very complicated very quickly,
but basically he figured out a useful way
to analyze situations like in that game show.
He also extended his ideas beyond pure game theory
to social interactions for example.
When he used them to analyze long term relationships
in situations where lots of people have to work together.
He even published a paper using game theory
to resolve a longstanding argument
in the Talmud.
Four Israelis have won Nobel Prizes since Auman,
and they were all in one subject,
you guessed it, chemistry.
First, we have Ada Yonath,
who shared the 2009 Chemistry Prize
with two other non-Israeli scientists.
To this day, Yonath is the only Israeli woman
to ever win a Nobel Prize and one of only five women
in the entire world to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Remember how Ciechanover
and Hershko discovered the system
that cells use to break down proteins?
Well Yonath's work focused on basically the opposite,
how cells create proteins,
specifically she discovered a whole bunch of new details
about the structure of ribosomes,
parts of the cell that make proteins.
Thanks to Yonath's work, we now know a whole lot more
about some of the tiniest, most important parts
of our cells.
The next Israeli Nobel Prize in Chemistry
came in 2011, when Dan Schechtman won for his discovery
of quasicrystals.
A type of material that's sort of a crystal,
but also sort of not.
Instead of being perfectly symmetrical in every way,
the pattern might only extend in certain directions.
The thing is,
scientists didn't think this was actually possible
in real life.
They'd never seen a material like that
until Schechtman discovered one by accident.
He was experimenting with different types of metals
when he noticed a weird pattern in the data.
Eventually, he figured out
that he was looking at a real life quasicrystal.
It took a long time for other scientists
to accept Schechtman's discovery,
but their discovery totally changed
how scientists think about
some of the most fundamental aspects of matter.
That and the ridicule from other scientists
that Schechtman had to fight inspired the Nobel Committee
to award him the Chemistry Prize in 2011.
The next, and currently the most recent Nobel Prize
to be awarded to Israelis was yet another Chemistry Prize.
In 2013, Israeli researchers Michael Levitt
and Arieh Warshel shared the Prize
with their American colleague, Martin Karplus.
Their contribution to the field,
a type of computer program that has allowed scientists
to simulate chemical reactions
they would never have been able to analyze before.
It was the 1970s, computers existed,
but they were enormous machines
that took up entire rooms,
and even the best computers in existence,
were thousands of times less powerful
than the average smartphone.
Still, even those early computers were super helpful
for studying chemistry.
But computers of the time
just couldn't handle larger molecules,
there were just too many moving parts
to calculate with much accuracy.
Karplus, Levitt, and Warshel figured out a way
to simulate those reactions accurately
without using nearly as much computational power.
This approach was incredibly helpful back then
since computers weren't exactly super powerful.
But even now, scientists are still using it
to study chemistry that even today's computers
wouldn't be powerful enough to handle otherwise.
Nobel Prizes are often awarded
for groundbreaking discoveries
that happened decades ago,
but in this case, their work is still very much
in use today.
In a way, that's true for the State of Israel as a whole.
The early Zionists founded a country
that emphasized connection to the real world,
and brought with it an almost inevitable dedication
to knowledge and drive towards innovation.
And if Israel's Nobel Prizes are anything to go by,
that's an attitude that continues to this day.
Thanks for watching, see you guys next time.
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