Homage to Nissan Rilov

Akiva Orr pays homage to a brave and honest man

Letter to Shimshon Bichler on Esther Alexander

Reflections on Esther Alexander and her tim

Letter to Shimshon Bichler on Esther Alexander

activists intellectuals Israeli communist partyReflections on Esther Alexander and her tim

Peace, Peace, and No Peace (שלום, שלום, ואין שלום)

מגב כריכת ההוצאה הראשונה, 1961 הספר סוקר את התפתחות יחסי ישראל-ערב בשנים 1961-1948 כפי שהשתקפו בעיתונות הישראלית ומעל במת הכנסת. דעות כל החוגים בישראל -- מ"חרות" עד מק"י – מובאות בהרחבה מפי דובריהם המוסמכים ביותר. רבים ימצאו כאן לראשונה תאור מפורט של עובדות נשכחות. המעטים היודעים את העובדות יופתעו להיווכח באיזו מידה מסוגל מנגנון תעמולה ממלכתי לעצב לא רק את השקפתו של האזרח אלא גם את זכרונו מההקדמה להוצאה השניה, 1999 למהדורה זו צורפו נספחים הכוללים מידע שהיה חסוי בשעתו ונחשף רק עשרות שנים לאחר שכתבנו את הספר. שיערנו שניתוחינו יקבלו לימים אישור נוסף. ואכן, העובדות שנחשפו מאז, שאחדות מהן הפתיעו גם אותנו, מאשרות את ניתוחנו. אין פירוש הדבר שכל המידע החסוי מאותה תקופה כבר נחש

Surviving the Holocaust: the anger and guilt of Primo Levi

Sixty years after the Nazi genocide the Holocaust is still very much to the fore in human memory and is still very much an issue, one of the major definitive experiences of world history. There have been literally thousands of books written on the experiences of the Holocaust, many of them from eyewitnesses and victims. Of all the works on the Holocaust, those by Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who survived the Holocaust, are amongst the most powerful. Levi was born in Turin on 13 July 1919; he died, either accidentally or more likely by committing suicide, also in Turin, on 11 April 1987. His writing is particularly noted for its understated passion and genuine anger and he remains a major cultural figure both in Italy and throughout the world. He challenges the idea of the 'Final Solution' being either exclusively German or exclusively in the past; he claims 'It happened therefore it can happen again ... it can happen, and it can happen everywhere'. Levi's work is clear about the nature of the Holocaust and its importance as a warning against genocide and ethnic cleansing. Levi holds a special fascination for many people. It is not just the power of his writing, his lack of hysterical judging, the strength of his intellect or the forcefulness of his ideas. He is indeed a major tragic figure and his writing makes one feel that his death is a personal loss. The world is a significantly poorer place without him. Yet Levi's writing is not about the past. It is history and culture and education in the grandest sense of the words, full of relevance about today and with vital lessons for tomorrow. With the fairly minor (compared to the 1930s) whiff of crisis throughout Europe, fascism again raises its head. Levi's works are cries of 'Never Again' against it. But he also is aware that reasoned argument is sometimes not enough to combat the violence of the fascists and racists; we must in the last resort 'find the strength to resist ... the memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not very long ago, can serve as support and warning'

Synthetic biology for the directed evolution of protein biocatalysts:navigating sequence space intelligently

The amino acid sequence of a protein affects both its structure and its function. Thus, the ability to modify the sequence, and hence the structure and activity, of individual proteins in a systematic way, opens up many opportunities, both scientifically and (as we focus on here) for exploitation in biocatalysis. Modern methods of synthetic biology, whereby increasingly large sequences of DNA can be synthesised de novo, allow an unprecedented ability to engineer proteins with novel functions. However, the number of possible proteins is far too large to test individually, so we need means for navigating the ‘search space’ of possible protein sequences efficiently and reliably in order to find desirable activities and other properties. Enzymologists distinguish binding (K (d)) and catalytic (k (cat)) steps. In a similar way, judicious strategies have blended design (for binding, specificity and active site modelling) with the more empirical methods of classical directed evolution (DE) for improving k (cat) (where natural evolution rarely seeks the highest values), especially with regard to residues distant from the active site and where the functional linkages underpinning enzyme dynamics are both unknown and hard to predict. Epistasis (where the ‘best’ amino acid at one site depends on that or those at others) is a notable feature of directed evolution. The aim of this review is to highlight some of the approaches that are being developed to allow us to use directed evolution to improve enzyme properties, often dramatically. We note that directed evolution differs in a number of ways from natural evolution, including in particular the available mechanisms and the likely selection pressures. Thus, we stress the opportunities afforded by techniques that enable one to map sequence to (structure and) activity in silico, as an effective means of modelling and exploring protein landscapes. Because known landscapes may be assessed and reasoned about as a whole, simultaneously, this offers opportunities for protein improvement not readily available to natural evolution on rapid timescales. Intelligent landscape navigation, informed by sequence-activity relationships and coupled to the emerging methods of synthetic biology, offers scope for the development of novel biocatalysts that are both highly active and robust