The State of the Jews

The Hebrew language needs your help:

For more than 1,000 years, when Hebrew speakers looked at the sky, they saw five planets – Hama (Mercury), Noga (Venus), Maadim (Mars), Tsedek (Jupiter) and Shabtai (Saturn). The five planets closest to earth all have ancient Hebrew names, some of them dating back to the time of the Talmud.

On the other hand, the two planets that are further away – Uranus and Neptune – were not known in ancient times, and are therefore referred to by these names in Hebrew, too. Now the Hebrew Language Academy is inviting the public to help choose Hebrew names for the solar system’s farthest flung planets.

Hat tip: Joel Hoffman.

I’m as excited as the next Israeli about our ninth Nobel laureate Ada Yonath, the first woman to win the chemistry Nobel in four decades.

(As Noah Pollack notes in a blog over at Commentary, news of the Israeli woman’s triumph comes on the same day that Hamas bans Gaza women from riding motorcycles.)

But there is another angle to this story that is perhaps more interesting: the recurring question about patenting biomedical techniques. Yonath was part of a team that discovered a new way of modeling the action of ribosomes, which are the chemical machines that transform the DNA “blueprint” into cellular structures. This discovery opened up new directions of research into antibiotics.

It was a wonderful discovery, but here’s the question: Should Yale University be holding a patent on the knowledge discovered by Yonath and her colleagues?

YalePatents.org opposes the patenting of “basic biological discoveries” on the grounds that limiting scientific research through commercial licensing harms research and delays the discovery of cures.

Weighing in on the latest Nobel, the site authors wonder whether “research so fundamental to life, such as the ribosome structure, [should] be locked up for commercial gain – like [Nobel's original discovery] Dynamite? Should a private institution, such as Yale, have the only say over how ribosomes may be developed into new biomedical technologies?”

In other words, should a fact of nature be off-limits to all but the original discoverer (or their funder)?