or decades, the attention of the scientific community was focused on the central dogma of biology - the decoding of the genetic information embedded in DNA. Little research was dedicated to how proteins are degraded and removed from cells. Enter onto the scene a young graduate student, Aaron Ciechanover, who with his mentor Avram Hershko, uncovered the complex and elegant ubiquitin proteolytic system. For his discovery, Ciechanover (Figure 1) shared in the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Hershko and Irwin Rose. The complete interview, with more stories about being a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the magic of "A-ha" moments, and the conflict between religion and Darwinism, can be seen on the JCI website, http://www.jci.org/kiosk/cgm.JCI: What was your childhood like?Ciechanover: I was born in Israel in 1947, the year Israel became independent, to parents that had emigrated as children from Poland, escaping the rising anti-Semitism there. I grew up in a modest Jewish conservative home. My mother was an English teacher and my father a lawyer.
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