Former Intel President speaks to Israeli Friends

The Israeli Friends of the Weizmann Institute of Science hosted Mr. Mooly Eden (pictured above), who served as President of Intel Israel and Senior VP of Intel International until 2015, on Dec. 24 at the Dan Hotel. Dr. Yifat Merbl of the Department of Immunology also spoke about the next challenges in personalized medicine: novel mechanisms in protein activity.

In his talk, entitled “The man-machine interface: Will we one day be replaced by robots?” Mr. Eden discussed how the Internet will become an expansion of the human mind. Human beings, he predicted, will have chips implanted in their bodies that could fill many technological functions of external devices, such as credit cards and car keys. This technology exists today, but it is mostly designed for the disabled or the chronically ill, for instance for hearing aids, pacemakers, and brain stimulators for epileptic patients.

He advocated for implanting such chips in healthy individuals to monitor health parameters, provide early notice of severe health events, and track the movement of dependents such as children and elderly. Despite the invasion of privacy, stated Mr. Eden, this technology has great potential to improve our quality of life. One of Mr. Eden’s most well-known inventions was the “anti-eraser,” an electronic component installed in televisions in Israel in the late 1970s to bypass the regulatory restrictions on color television broadcasting.

His son, Dr. Eran Eden, received his PhD at the Weizmann Institute in systems biology and is cofounder and CEO of MeMed, which offers diagnostic solutions for inflammatory and infectious diseases.