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Israel fast becoming a high-tech powerhouse
JOSHUA MECKLER
Jewish Bulletin of Northern California
HAIFA, Israel - How would you like to be able to store every bit of information in the world on your computer's hard drive? Or what if doctors could use a device to see inside you and warn you before you had a heart attack? Perhaps you'd like to remove blemishes from your skin, but instead of burning them off with a laser, you could use less-damaging sound waves.
These ideas aren't the stuff of fantasy. They're being brought to reality at this very moment. And what's more, they're being created not in the technological meccas of the United States or Japan but in a tiny Mideast country.
Israel, a young nation of just 6 million people, has fast become a world leader in high technology. With 135 engineers per 100,000 people, the Jewish state has the highest number of engineers per capita in the world - a proportion double that of the United States. Numerous American and Silicon Valley firms have chosen to set up research and development facilities in Israel - among them Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and IBM. And the country - home to some 2,000 technology startup companies - has the world's greatest concentration of such firms outside of Silicon Valley.
At the small end of the spectrum are individuals such as Uri Sivan, a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and David Tamir, the top executive at an Israeli start-up company. Sivan is one of the brains behind the idea to use DNA to build computer-information storage devices.
Working with colleagues at the Technion, Sivan has learned how to use biological processes to craft electrical circuits out of DNA molecules. Such circuits are incredibly small, a level of miniaturization that would be impossible to reach with current engineering techniques. Each cell in a human body contains three gigabytes of information encoded in the DNA, he said.
Tamir is president and CEO of Nanomotion Ltd., a firm that makes motors capable of producing extremely fine movements. Like many of his fellow entrepreneurs in Israel, he calls himself "a workaholic. By the time you see the money," he said, "you can't enjoy it."
What keeps him at work late at night and on weekends? "I think it's the curiosity and challenge and wanting to see something you believe in being done."
While Tamir and Sivan's work may herald in the technology of tomorrow, the medical research coming out of Israel today is of more immediate importance to many. For example, the multimillion-dollar Elscint company has developed a CT Scan device that can detect calcification inside the heart and determine the risk of heart attack. This technology received approval earlier this year from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Another large company, ESC, produces laser devices for cosmetic applications such as hair removal, varicose vein treatment and skin resurfacing. More than half of ESC's exports go to the United States. And, notes Zvi Ladon, vice president of clinical applications and regulatory affairs, "I would say most of those exports go to California." Meanwhile, a separate start-up company is researching the effects of sound-waves on skin.
Of all Israel's high-tech companies, it should come as no surprise that the largest one is dedicated to the military. Israel Aircraft Industries has some 14,000 workers.
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