Israeli makes 'Scientific American''s top 50

Dr. Shulamit Levenberg, a 37-year-old Technion biomedical engineer and tissue engineering researcher whose work aims toward the creation of lab-manufactured tissues and organs for transplant, has been included in Scientific American 50. The listing, selected by the prestigious science journal Scientific American, honors 50 people, teams, companies and organizations whose accomplishments in research, business or policymaking demonstrate technological leadership. Levenberg - modern Orthodox, married and the mother of five (including a baby) - hopes her work will eventually lead to the cure of degenerative diseases. save lives, stem cell researchers' work is encouraged. Although the construction of a whole synthetic pancreas, heart or lung is still far off, Levenberg and her colleagues are digging away at the problem bit by bit and believe an earlier achievement would be to repair damaged brain, cartilage or muscle tissue. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston for five years of post-doctoral work, she built biological scaffolds to coax stem cells into developing into specific cell types. Understanding how they differentiate into different types of cells is a challenge and will supply a great deal of information on fetal development and the creation of blood vessels that nurture tissue, she says.