The formative years - childhood in the newly born state of Israel（在以色列的童年）
I was born in Haifa, a port city in the northern part of Israel, in October 1947, one month before Israel was recognized by the United Nations (UN) as an independent state. It took several additional months to establish the necessary institutions and for the British to leave, and on May 15th 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the modern Jewish state and its first Prime Minister, made Israel a fact and declared its establishment as a democratic state and a home for every Jew in the world. The neighboring, but even more distant Arab countries, along with powerful Arab parties from within, did not accept the UN resolution and deliberately decided to alter it by force. A bloody and costly war erupted. It lasted a year, and more than 1% of the population of the newly born and defenseless state sacrificed their lives on its defense. I assume that the first two years of my life (1947-1949) were extremely difficult for my parents, Bluma (nee Lubashevsky) and Yitzhak, who immigrated from Poland with their families as adolescents in the mid-1920s. Why did their families leave Poland - their "homeland" - their houses, working places, property, relatives and friends, and decided to make their new home in a place with a vague, if any, clear future, that was part of the British Empire? They were idealists who enthusiastically followed the call of the Zionist movement that was established at the turn of the century by Benjamin Ze'ev Herzel - the seer of the Jewish State - to settle the land and make it - after two thousand years in the Diaspora, since the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem - a home for the Jews. Following the Jewish Congress in Basel (Switzerland) in 1896, Herzel declared: "In Basel I founded the Jewish State". At that time Israel was part of the Ottoman Empire and became in 1917 part of the British Empire. My parents came from religious families, and the move, I believe, had also religious roots: Jews, throughout their lives in the Diaspora, have not stopped dreaming of having their own country, with Jerusalem as its capital, a dream that was driven by a biblical decree and prophecy: "Thus saith the Lord GOD: Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, whither they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land" (Ezekiel 37:21); "And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers dwelt; and they shall dwell therein, they, and their children, and their children's children, for ever" (Ezekiel 37:25); "And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people; and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying" (Isaiah 65:19); "And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them" (Isaiah 65:21).
The question of timing was an important one, as despite centuries of continuous persecution and discrimination in Europe, the initial idea to establish a Jewish State had been the dream of a few. Only small groups of Jews settled in Israel during the 18th, 19th, and the beginning of the 20th century. It was only towards the end of the 19th century, with the ideas of Herzel and the moves that led to the Balfour declaration (the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, who declared in 1917 the recognition in the need for a Jewish homeland), that an active Zionist movement and institutions were established, resulting in the translation of the dream into reality. Yet, it took an enormous amount of courage and daring by these European Jews to materialize this dream and try to establish, with almost no resources or support, a homeland in a place they had dreamt of for two thousand years, but that was not theirs at the time. The process was clearly accelerated by the heavy clouds that then covered the skies of Europe and that ended with the Holocaust. Many members of my parents' families immigrated to Israel before the Holocaust, but those who remained in Poland were perished by the murderous German and their loyal Polish collaborators. The conversion of this movement into a State at that particular time (1947-1948) was no doubt the direct historical result of the holocaust, and symbolized the rise of the Jewish Nation from ash.
My father was a clerk in a law firm (later - along with my brother - he studied law and became a lawyer), and my mother was a housewife and English teacher. My brother, Joseph (Yossi), who is 14 years older then me, was already on his national military compulsory service when I was 4 years old, the age from which I remember myself. I grew up in Haifa and enjoyed the wonderful beaches and Mount Carmel that rolls into the Mediterranean Sea. From my early days at home I remember a strong encouragement to study. My father worked hard to make sure we obtained the best possible education, and at the same time he was a member in the "Hagannah" (defense), one of the pre-state military organizations that fought the British for an independent Jewish State. Working in a law firm in the Arab section of the city, he risked his life daily going to work during the pre independence war hostilities and then the war time. My brother told me the family was waiting daily on the balcony to see him returning home safely. At home he used every free minute to delve into classic literature, Jewish religious law (Mishnah and Talmud) and modern law books. An important part of the education at home involved Judaism and Zionism. On the Jewish side we obtained a liberal modern orthodox education. We attended services in the synagogue every Saturday and during holidays, and celebrated at home all Jewish feasts. Needless to say that my mother kept a kosher kitchen. It was extremely important for my parents to educate us as a new breed of proud Israeli Jews in their own independent country. My father inherited me with his love of Jewish studies and cultural life. To this very day, along with several physicians and scientists colleagues, I take regular lessons taught by a rabbinical scholar, on how the Jewish law views moral and ethical problems related to modern medicine and science. Jewish cantorial music reflecting prayers of Jews along many centuries has become my favorite music, and I avidly search for this vanishing vocal expression of Jewish culture in flea markets, used records stores, and auctions all over. Also, different Judaica artifacts decorate my study. In parallel, my parents made sure we should receive an excellent general education. My father spoke fluently several languages, Hebrew, Polish, Arabic, French, English, German and Yiddish, and wanted me to acquire his strong love for books: while our home was not a rich one, we had a huge library. My parents also loved classical music, so we had a great collection of 78 rpm, and later 33 rpm records. I remember that Bizet's Carmen occupied more than twenty, double-sided, RCA (His Master's Voice) 78 rpm bakelite records. The apparently peaceful life of our family in Israel (although under the British Crown) during the years of the Holocaust in Europe (1939-1945) were overshadowed by the murder of their family members and of many families of their relatives and friends that did not escape Europe in time. For my parents, the establishment of the State of Israel as an independent and sovereign Jewish State was a direct historical result of the Holocaust in Europe and a clear statement of "Never Massadah shall fall again" (Massadah was one of the last strongholds of Jews during the Roman Empire. It fell into Roman hands after a long curfew during which all its defenders committed suicide in order not to fall as prisoners in Roman hands. While asiring for freedom, they lost their land and lives. They were not ready to live anywhere or under any circumstances, but as free people in their own land). They left us with the idea that the Jewish State will not only protect us as a free people, but will allow us to develop our own unique culture in a more general national context, rather than as minorities scattered in different countries in the Diaspora.
Falling in love with biology（爱上生物学）
From early days I remember my strong inclination towards biology, though it has taken different directions at different times. I remember collecting flowers on Mount Carmel and drying them in the heavy Babylonian Talmud of my brother. I will never forget his rage at discovering my love of nature hidden among the pages of the old Jewish tracts. Then came the turtles and the lizards, and extracting chlorophyll from leaves with alcohol, and the first microscope my brother bought me from his trip to England when I was 11 years old. With this microscope I discovered cells (in the thin onion epithelium) and did my first experiment in osmosis, when I followed the alteration in the volume of the cells after immersing the epithelium in salt solutions of different strengths. With friends we tried to launch a self propelled rocket. The flowers collection kept growing, now in special dedicated albums, and with it, a small collection of skeletons of different animals - fish, frog, snake, turtle, and even some human bones I received from an older friend who was a medical student. After several years of amateurish flirting with biology, I decided to formalize my knowledge and love of biology, and to major in biology in high school. While my years in elementary (1953-1959) and junior high school (1959-1963) were mostly uneventful and passed without any thoughts on my future, the last two years in "Hugim" (circles) high school in Haifa (1963-1965) were not. I had wonderful and inspiring teachers in biology (Naomi Nof), chemistry (Na'ama Greenspon), and physics and mathematics (Harry Amitay) who revealed to me a little of these different and exciting disciplines. Yet, I felt that twice as much was still concealed. Biology at that time was largely a descriptive area. While we studied the mechanism of conversion of glucose to H2O and CO2 and the production of energy in yeast and mammals (and the opposite process occurring during photosynthesis in plants), and became acquainted with simple graphic descriptions of mitotic and meiotic cell divisions, most of our studies were devoted to detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna in our region, to comparative zoology (I remember well the efforts invested in memorizing the twelve differences between the frog and the toad, or between the circulatory systems and skeletal structure of the cat and dog), and to basic descriptive human anatomy and physiology (e.g. how the human skeleton structure enables posture on two limbs). Pathogenetic mechanisms of diseases had not been taught, and the structure of DNA and the genetic code had entered our textbooks only towards the end of our high school studies, in 1964/5. On the other hand, chemistry and physics appeared to me, maybe naively, strong mechanistic disciplines built on solid mathematical foundations. As a result, I had a deep feeling that the future somehow resided in biology, in deciphering basic mechanisms, as so little was then known. Yet, the complexity of biological and pathological processes looked to me enormous, almost beyond our ability to grasp, and I was intimidated: while I was clearly attracted to the secrets of biology, I was afraid to get lost. Importantly, I had nobody around, close enough, to consult, to clarify my thoughts. While deliberating between the largely unknown in biology and what I naively thought were the already well founded physics and chemistry, medicine emerged as a compromise: it appeared to me as representing a balanced mixture of physics, chemistry, basic biology and physiology, along with interesting pathology and social sciences.
Adding to this complexity was that during these years I lost both of my parents: my mother died in 1958 and my father in 1964. After the death of my mother, I was left with my father who took wonderful care of me. When my father died several years later, my late aunt Miriam (Wishniak; my mother's sister), with the help of my brother and sister-in-law, Atara, took me to her home in Haifa, enabling me to seamlessly complete my high school studies in the same class and along with my friends - without interruption. The other option was to move to Tel Aviv, to my brother's home, but this would have been much more complicated. So I spent the weekdays with my aunt in Haifa, studying, and the weekends and holidays with my brother and sister-in-law, in Tel Aviv. Their help was a true miracle, as thinking of it retrospectively, being left alone without parents at the age of sixteen, the distance to youth delinquency was shorter than the one to the high school class. Yet, with the help of these wonderful family members, I managed to continue.
How my love of biology evolved to become a career（爱好演化为职业）
Towards graduation from high school I had to make a decision. The regular track would have taken me, like most Israelis, to national compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces, IDF, a duty we were all eager to fulfill. In addition to the regular service, the army encourages certain high school graduates to postpone their service and first obtain a university education, particularly in areas that are relevant to the military, such as medicine and different disciplines in engineering and sciences. Lacking any financial support, I thought it would be better to acquire a practical profession I could make a living from as soon as I could. As I mentioned, medicine emerged as a compromise between the complexity and mysteries of biological mechanisms to what I thought are the already well founded physics and chemistry. Not less important, medicine has traditionally been the ultimate in "Jewish" professions, the dream of every Jewish mother and family. What also attracted me to medicine is that I was under the impression that diseases can be cured: as children, we may have been influenced by short, self-limiting diseases that affected us, like influenza and measles, and were not directly aware of the major killers that left physicians and scientists alike helpless (much like these days), such as malignancies, vascular diseases and neuro-degenerative disorders: I had not appreciated at the time how far more descriptive medicine is, much more than biology. Practically and not less important (which helped solve my dilemma), was the fact that biology was not an option in this military-supported service postponement program. Last but not least, it was a practical choice, a profession one can make a living on. So, after a fierce competition I was accepted into the only medical school in Israel at that time, that of the HebrewUniversity and "Hadassah" in Jerusalem (1965). The first four years (1965-1969) were exciting. We studied basic and clinical sciences, and I started to seriously entertain the idea of broadening my knowledge base in biochemistry or pharmacology. Towards the end of the 4th year, once we started to examine patients, serious doubts had begun to arise whether I made the right choice and truly want to become a practicing physician. The imbalance between phenomenology and pathogenetic mechanisms of diseases on one hand, and the lack of any mechanism-based treatment for most of the major killers on the other hand, made me seriously think that I was on the wrong trail. I felt restless and started to realize how little we know, how descriptive is our understanding of disease mechanisms and pathology, and as a consequence how most treatments are symptomatic in nature rather then causative. The statement "with God's help" that I heard so frequently from patients that were praying for cure and health, took on a real meaning. I had a feeling clinical medicine was going to bore me, and decided to take one year off in order to "taste" true and "wet" basic research. The Faculty of Medicine had a special, one year program for the few who elected to broaden their knowledge in basic research, and I decided to major in biochemistry. I had to convince my brother that this was the right thing to do, as I needed his help to further postpone my military service by one year. This was not easy, as he too had a "dream" - to see me independent with a profession from which I could make a living, and which in the traditional Jewish spirit was nothing else but practical medicine. Following our parents' death, he felt he was responsible for my future and well being, and wanted to see me professionally and financially independent as soon as he could. I nevertheless managed to convince him, and during that year (1969-1970), under the guidance of excellent biochemists, Jacob Bar-Tana and Benjamin Shapira, I investigated mechanisms of CCl4-induced fatty liver in a rat model, and discovered that it may be caused, at least partially, by an increased activity of phosphatidic acid phosphatase, a key enzyme involved in di- and triglycerides biosynthesis. Completing this research year (and obtaining a M.Sc. degree), I knew I had found a new love - biochemistry. Jacob and Benjamin walked me through the exciting maze of biochemical pathways, and I was mystified. Yet, the consummation was still far away. Being loyal to the promise I made to my brother, and also to my commitment to the Israeli army, I completed the clinical years (1970-1972) and graduated from MedicalSchool.
