The United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) is a grant-awarding institution that promotes collaborative research in a wide range of basic and applied scientific disciplines, established in 1972 by an agreement between the governments of the United States and Israel. Numerous scientists participating in BSF programs have won prestigious awards such as the Nobel, Lasker and Wolf prizes. [1] The Foundation grant recipients include 43 Nobel Prize laureates, 19 winners of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, and 38 recipients of the Wolf Prize. [2] [3]
The BSF's income is derived from interest on an endowment of $100 million which was established in equal parts by the United States and Israeli governments. The organization is governed by a Board of Governors consisting of five American and five Israeli members, appointed by their respective governments. The BSF's base of operations is in Jerusalem.
Grants are awarded on a competitive, peer-reviewed basis, a process juried by scientists from the United States, Israel and around the world. To be eligible for consideration, grant requests must be of outstanding scientific quality and demonstrate substantive collaboration between American and Israeli principal investigators. They must be for peaceful purposes and conducted under the aegis of not-for-profit institutions such as universities, research institutes and governmental bodies.
The Wolf Prize is an international award granted in Israel, that has been presented most years since 1978 to living scientists and artists for "achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among people ... irrespective of nationality, race, colour, religion, sex or political views."
The Japan Prize is awarded to individuals whose original and outstanding achievements in science and technology are recognized as having advanced the frontiers of knowledge and served the cause of peace and prosperity for mankind. As of 2024, the Japan Prize has been awarded to 111 people from more than ten countries.
The Wolf Prize in Chemistry is awarded annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics and Arts.
The Wolf Prize in Medicine is awarded annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics and Arts. The Prize has been stated to be the second most prestigious award in science, and a significant predictor of the Nobel Prize.
Aaron Ciechanover is an Israeli biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for characterizing the method that cells use to degrade and recycle proteins using ubiquitin.
Joseph Leonard Goldstein ForMemRS is an American biochemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985, along with fellow University of Texas Southwestern researcher, Michael Brown, for their studies regarding cholesterol. They discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood and that when LDL receptors are not present in sufficient numbers, individuals develop hypercholesterolemia and become at risk for cholesterol related diseases, notably coronary heart disease. Their studies led to the development of statin drugs.
Harvey James Alter is an American medical researcher, virologist, physician and Nobel Prize laureate, who is best known for his work that led to the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. Alter is the former chief of the infectious disease section and the associate director for research of the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. In the mid-1970s, Alter and his research team demonstrated that most post-transfusion hepatitis cases were not due to hepatitis A or hepatitis B viruses. Working independently, Alter and Edward Tabor, a scientist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, proved through transmission studies in chimpanzees that a new form of hepatitis, initially called "non-A, non-B hepatitis" caused the infections, and that the causative agent was probably a virus. This work eventually led to the discovery of the hepatitis C virus in 1988, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2020 along with Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice.
Victor R. Ambros is an American developmental biologist and Nobel Laureate who discovered the first known microRNA (miRNA). He is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He completed both his undergraduate and doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ambros received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2024 for his research on microRNA.
Henry Neufeld, was an Israeli cardiologist and scholar. His research and teaching interests included cardiology, epidemiology, genetics and biomedical engineering. He served as chief scientist of the Israel Ministry of Health and was the founder and director of the Cardiac Clinic at Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer.
Tu Youyou is a Nobel Prize-winning Chinese malariologist and pharmaceutical chemist. She discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.
James Patrick Allison is an American immunologist and Nobel laureate who holds the position of professor and chair of immunology and executive director of immunotherapy platform at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Allison is Regental Professor and Founding-Director of James P. Allison Institute at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Assaf Naor is an Israeli American and Czech mathematician, computer scientist, and a professor of mathematics at Princeton University.
Kazutoshi Mori is a Japanese molecular biologist known for research on unfolded protein response. He is a professor of Biophysics at the Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, and shared the 2014 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award with Peter Walter for discoveries concerning the unfolded protein response — an intracellular quality control system that detects harmful misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum and signals the nucleus to carry out corrective measures.
Gregg Leonard Semenza is an American pediatrician and Professor of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He serves as the director of the vascular program at the Institute for Cell Engineering. He is a 2016 recipient of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is known for his discovery of HIF-1, which allows cancer cells to adapt to oxygen-poor environments. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability" with William Kaelin Jr. and Peter J. Ratcliffe. Semenza has had thirteen research papers retracted due to falsified data.
William G. Kaelin Jr. is an American Nobel laureate physician-scientist. He is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. His laboratory studies tumor suppressor proteins. In 2016, Kaelin received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the AACR Princess Takamatsu Award. He also won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2019 along with Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza.
Amnon Pazy, אמנון פזי was an Israeli mathematician who specialized in partial differential equations (PDE), making important contributions to the PDE field and Semigroups. He served as president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was the chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel. He also had a brief appearance as a background character in “Friends,” season 9.
Drew Weissman is an American physician and immunologist known for his contributions to RNA biology. Weissman is the inaugural Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research, director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, and professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn).
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the American virologists Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice "for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus." During the award ceremony on December 10, 2020, Prof. Gunilla Karlsson-Hedestam said:
"The discovery of the Hepatitis C virus by this year’s Laureates laid the foundation for our current understanding about how the virus survives in its niche during the long chronic phase of the infection, and how liver disease develops. And importantly, it led to the development of highly effective anti-viral medicines that now cure the infection in almost all treated persons."