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Perhaps you are like me, and can hardly tell the difference among such numbers as π, and Avogadro’s number, and Euler’s constant, and the exponential constant, and Amazon Prime’s numbers, that Jeff Bezos is trying to patent. Quite possibly you have no idea — I certainly don’t — what Markov chains are, and string theory, and the unified field theory, and Mandelbrot’s sets, and De Sitter Space, and non-Riemannian geometries, and Hilbert Space, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Markushevich’s paper on completeness that I remember reading back when I was just a college kid at Moscow State. So much to learn, so little time.
And the plucky little engine that could, Israel, fights on, against its genocidal enemies, from the air, from the sea, and on land, and even deep underground, in what sometimes requires combat at close quarters, fighting Hamas in Gaza to the west and exchanging fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon to the north, while keeping a close eye on the Houthis in Yemen and the Iranians in Iran, who are behind it all. It’s Israel’s professional army and the 360,000 reservists who have been called up to serve in this fourth war for Israel’s survival — the other three being in 1948, 1967, and 1973 — who will save the only Jewish state, and defeat those who want it to be replaced “from the river to the sea” by a twenty-third Arab state.
Meanwhile, Israel’s deep bench of scientists is hard at work, contributing to advances in several dozen fields, that will make all our lives better. One new development came to my attention just today, about researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science who have discovered ways to more quickly adapt animal antibodies to make them safe for human use. You can find the full description of this remarkable advance here: “Researchers find new way to make animal antibodies safe for humans,” by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, Jerusalem Post, February
Weizmann Institute of Science researchers present a new algorithm to greatly speed up the process of engineering therapeutic proteins to protect against diseases.
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot have developed an algorithm that offers a much faster and cheaper way of adapting animal antibodies to make them safe for humans – instead of basing them on blood serum extracted from immunized horses and guinea pigs that was used to protect people against diphtheria.
Replacing an antibody’s animal segments with human ones is laborious, time-consuming, and costly; not only that, it can make an antibody less effective or even entirely useless. Now, in a study published in the prestigious journal Nature Biomedical Engineering under the title “Computational optimization of antibody humanness and stability by systematic energy-based ranking,” the researchers have taken a different approach….
CUMAb is a powerful new tool that could significantly speed up the design of new antibody-based drugs, as well as lower development costs. Fleishman and his team have turned the algorithm into a web server that any academic can use.
Together with collaborators, he then applied CUMAb to explore every possible way to humanize a mouse antibody. The algorithm computed a whopping 20,000 humanized variants of a single antibody and predicted the structural stability of each, selecting the best ones for testing. “This is the first time that a method has shown such broad success in this critical biomedical engineering problem. It is quite likely to become a key element in accelerating the transition from therapeutic candidate molecules to real-world drugs,” he added.
The results were extraordinary. Without any additional adjustments to the proposed designs, the humanized antibodies functioned just as effectively as the mouse’s original.” Tests of four other antibodies, all designed with CUMAb, were just as impressive and sometimes even surpassed the original animal antibody’s activity or stability.
“This is the first time that a method has shown such broad success in this critical biomedical engineering problem. It is quite likely to become a key element in accelerating the transition from therapeutic candidate molecules to real-world drugs,” said Fleishman….
Okay, Israel, that’s what you’ve done for us lately. Aside, I mean, from defending the West against the jihadis who would, if they could, destroy both your state and all other non-Muslim states.
And one more thing. I notice that among the four principal researchers in the photograph accompanying the article in the Jerusalem Post, one is named Razi Khalaila. Judging by his name, he must be an Israeli Arab. What do you make of that, all you malevolent protesters screaming about “the apartheid state of Israel”?
heartland says
Israel has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of anti-Semitic Arabs. They did this through the deployment of the magical Iron Dome without which they would have had to resort to carpet bombing. They have saved the lives of countless innocent Gazans through the use of the technical achievement called the Iron Sting. It hits a single target with only minimal collateral damage. Indeed, Israel is in the process of freeing the Gazans, terrorist or not, from the strangle hold of Hamas who has sucked freedom from them by demanding they give their lives for the cause of killing as many Jews as possible.
Algorithmic Analyst says
In contrast, Islam practices reverse eugenics.
truebearing says
LOL! This proves truth can be funny and sad simultaneously.
Ed Snider says
For Muslims, all of the great contributions to humanity of the Jews, and the Israelis in particular, are nothing other than a deliberate slap in the face. How can it be that 12,000,000 Jews are the world’s indispensable people while 1,300,000,000 Muslims count for nothing other than the trouble they can make for people who want only to be left alone? Israeli science should keep the light of its great achievements secret. As each new one is revealed to the world, hundreds of thousands of new antisemites are the inevitable result.
Alkflaeda says
Islam operates on appropriation. They tried to appropriate the Jewish role as God’s chosen people, and were offended when Jewish people weren’t having it (plus there’s a little matter of God not having it either). Israel’s scientific discoveries are probably on the Islamic “must have” list of things that Allah will later have turned out to have revealed to Muslims. And the Arab scientist on the team that was looking at antibodies is a positive gift to them – because, rather than being a model of inter-cultural collaboration, their perspective will be that most of the inspiration and hard work was his!
We are always told that Islam pioneered medieval mathematics and science, but I wonder how much appropriation was going on there as well. Volume 10 (1910) of the Jewish Quarterly Review has an illuminating paragraph on p.533:
“Under the heading Mathematics the series of articles in the Bibliotheca Mathematica, 1893 seq., by Steinschneider, Mathematik bet den Juden, might be mentioned. Perhaps the most important fact in this connexion is Curtze’s discovery (Adéhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Leipzig, 1902) that the Practica Geometriae of Leonardo Pisano, considered the main source for the introduction of Arabic geometry into Europe, is based entirely on the Latin translation of the Hebrew geometry of Abraham Bar Hiyya. The original of the latter has been published by M. Guttmann (Berlin, 1912-3)”.
Hannah says
Yeah, but if we kept the achievements to ourselves, the inevitable leaks would ALSO produce hundreds of thousands of new antisemites, who would accuse us of elitism. Jew-hatred will find any excuse.
truebearing says
Islam and Leftism are religions of hate. They both see power as the only good and death as the path to power. They are both a blight upon humanity and a curse upon themselves. Israel is the living refutation of everything they believe or seek.
RS says
Israel has done many things for mankind. They turned a desert into a blooming fruitful land with agriculture, and they are sponsors of technology, medicine, music, and are the first to show up to give humanitarian aid for many victims around the world to help vicitms of earth quakes and other weather disasters. They shouldn’t falter in defending their land. Carving a Palestinian state from grabbing Jewish land is underscored by the fact that 78% of the land was guaranteed to the Jewish people under International law, (The League of Nations Covenant, San Remo resolution ). and British Mandate for Palestine was unilaterally carved by Britain to create Jordan…Jordan is the Palestinian Arab state.