Talila Volk

Getting the Whole Picture

jhalper | February 12, 2015

What's in a picture? Prof. Benny Shilo knows the value of a good picture. We recently mentioned his book: Life’s Blueprint, which uses photographs of things like bread dough and yeast cells to illustrate the process of biological development. Here is the image from the most recent piece we have uploaded on his research: This is an individual Islet of Langerhans, as you’ve never seen it before. The white dots are the insulin-containing vesicles inside the beta cells, which both sense glucose levels and secrete insulin. Shilo and his team managed to get “close-up shots” of the individual cell…

One Man's Retirement Plan

jhalper | April 1, 2012

Have you given any thought to your retirement? Planning on pottering? Catching up on reading? Thinking you'll cross that bridge when you come to it? According to Prof. Bernardo Vidne, retirement can be more like jumping out of a plane than crossing a bridge - even if you are prepared. The story of Vidne's working career is almost archetypical: From a poor childhood in Argentina, he rose to become head of the largest cardiac surgery department in Israel. In addition to some 40,000 surgeries - 10,000 on children - Vidne authored around 300 papers in medical journals and taught many students.…