Budget bungles

By SHLOMO MAITAL
An article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. Every year around now, Israel's Finance Ministry tables the outline of its 2009 budget. This year, Finance Minister Roni Bar-On took a new tack. He offered the Cabinet two budgets: Guns or butter. Defense or social welfare. But at its August 17 cabinet meeting, the government predictably picked both. Could elections be near? Bank of Israel Deputy Governor Prof. Zvi Ekstein threatens higher interest rates if the Cabinet busts the budget. Lost in the current guns-butter debate is a third dimension: test tubes - Israel's crumbling basic research and higher education system. In early July, Bar-On blasted university professors. He scolded them in the Knesset, saying that "they teach from zero to three hours a week" and claiming they fly abroad on private trips and bill the university. University presidents say they will not open their universities' doors in October unless they get needed funding. The new budget has none. Recently, a committee headed by former finance minister Avraham (Beiga) Shochat recommended that government funding for universities be increased by 1.8 billion shekels ($520 million) annually by 2013. Since 2003, the Finance Ministry has slashed university budgets by 20 percent. But instead of increasing university funding, the Finance Ministry now demands that the universities pay back 150 m. shekels ($44 m.) from last year's budget - and has threatened to freeze the 770 m. shekels ($230 m.) already promised for development, research and technology. Since salaries of tenured faculty must be paid, it is research that is slashed. Sometimes the link between 'test tubes' - funding basic research in universities - and the practical benefits such research generates is hard to prove. In a myopic political system, this makes higher education a ripe target for budget cuts. Let me therefore give one small example. It is quite possible, according to Noam Gavrieli, a former vice dean of Haifa Technion's Medical School, that a brilliant 71-year-old Technion physiologist named Yoram Palti will one day win a Nobel Prize for inventing a cure for cancer. If so, it will be in part because of his creativity and brilliance, but in part because his basic research done in the mid-1960s was funded. Palti, an emeritus professor of physiology and biophysics, told me that long ago, his PhD research focused on understanding the electric field distribution in human cells. Many years later, in 2000, it occurred to him, he said, based on his early basic research, that "I can design electric fields that would damage dividing cells." "Most normal cells rarely divide in adults," he explained. "But cancer cells divide all the time." He realized that in adults "this could be a tool to combat the rapidly dividing proliferating cancer cells." It could be an entirely new direction for curing cancer, utterly different from the current approaches of chemotherapy and radiation. Palti founded a company, NovoCure, in his basement, to develop his invention. Today, Palti's device is undergoing Phase 3 clinical trials in the United States and has shown great promise for halting the growth of glioblastoma brain tumors (the kind that Senator Ted Kennedy has and that killed composer George Gershwin). How does Palti's invention work? According to Katherine Bourzac, writing in the MIT Technology Review, patients with glioblastoma brain tumors wear a kind of cap that generates an electrical field. The components that create the electric field are carried in a briefcase. The anti-tumor cap ruins the cancerous cells when they divide. It does this because of geometry. "A dividing cell has an hourglass shape," Palti told Bourzac, "rather than a round shape of a non-dividing cell." The electric field generated by the NovoCure cap passes around and through cells uniformly. But in a dividing (cancerous) cell, the narrow neck at the center acts like a lens, concentrating the electric field at this point which soon tears the cell apart. The tumors stop growing. I asked Palti, "What is the secret of your enduring creativity?" "Curiosity and dedication to find solutions to important issues may be the key," he responded. "…[T]he wisdom and insight gained [with age] can be directed to a better utilization of the available capabilities. The main thing is to take advantage of this and keep pursuing." Some 40 years ago, Israeli universities received funding, even though Israel was still a poor country. Scholars, like Palti, could do superb basic research. Today, why is Israel, now a wealthy country, suborning its role as a light unto the nations to the darkness of budget myopia? • The writer is academic director, TIM-Tel Aviv. An article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.