Nonlinear Development by Rafael Rangel Aldao
October 26, 2009
Francois Franceschi: As criollo as arepas
The kid from Maracay, Francois Franceschi, As criollo as arepas
No country appreciates pertinent science like Israel. It is key to the greatest ecological and political tension in the world: war and the desert.
That was the way it was in 1933 when Dr. Chaim Weizmann (CW) conceived the idea of an institute in the town of Rehovot, and even in 1949, starting year of the famous Weizmann Institute (IW).
The new nation, led by the same CW, has a worldview vision based on pure science such as chemistry, biochemistry, optics, electronics, bacteriology, biophysics, polymers, isotopes, and applied mathematics. Neither war, nor desert.
Not surprisingly, then, that twenty years later, in 1969, a graduate of IW published in Nature, stuff about the structure of collagen, or striated muscle, little relevant to the defense of Israel. A decade later, the lady is set on another distant abstraction, the cellular protein factory, the ribosome. The woman, from Israel, creates an international network of researchers, including a boy from USB (Simon Bolivar University) who in the eighties began his scientific career in Maracay, with Flor Herrera, at BIOMED, Núcleo Aragua UC, near Commercial Batah. From La Morita to Berlin and Hamburg.
In 2000-2001, Ada Yonath and her team deciphered the structure of the ribosome, with a curious detail. Of four key articles, three, have as a principal author, in Cell, Nature and EMBO-J,respectively Flor’s pride, the kid from Maracay Francois Francheschi, as criollo as an arepa. The finding, wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009, to Ada Yonath, Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who independently explained how proteins are made.
Half of all antibiotics target the ribosome, Ah, relevance! That is why, François, leaves Europe and academia for the United States in 2002 as chief technology officer of Nobel Steitz and his company Rib-X. In recent years, they created new ribosomal antibiotics for the rich and for the poor, for Israelis and for Palestinians, among others.