Celebrating the Israel Prize

Israeli TV commentator Keren Marciano interviewed Prof. Kimchi, who spoke about the connection between art and science, which, she said, are both driven by passion. In her youth, she was a ballerina, and had to choose between a career in ballet or in science.

“When a person wants to achieve, he dreams and uses his artistic skills and eventually reaches the realization of the dream,” says Prof. Kimchi. “I was hesitant and uncertain when I was young, but I decided to go for science because I was curious and my curiosity challenged me,” she says.
Prof. Yakir described some of his first steps in his research, which involved ripping off the corners of newspapers that were sent from all over the world to the Weizmann library. In an innovative method that precluded the need to travel around the world to examine trees, he would instead examine the newspapers to determine which trees were used to produce them and use the corresponding dates of publication to identify the dates the trees were alive.
Marciano also interviewed the guest of honor Eyal Waldman, President and CEO of Mellanox, a supplier of computer networking products recently acquired by the California technology company Nvidia.