Glow-in-the-Dark Monkeys and a Man Who Cooks Diamonds: 2019's Best Interviews

In November, Palo Alto's Nir Zuk took a stab at Check Point, Facebook

Nearly two decades have passed since Nir Zuk, 48, the founder and chief technology officer of leading cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks Inc., left rival Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., slamming the door behind him. Zuk was Check Point's third employee and later led development in the U.S., before leaving in 1999. "None of this is personal, it's just business," Zuk would later clarify, after a long and expansive interview. Still, talking to Zuk, one is left with a feeling that whether overtly or covertly, Palo Alto operates according to one simple rule: whatever Check Point does, do the opposite. Read more

 

Benny Landa's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

 

In his central Israeli lab, 73-year-old printing multi-millionaire Benny Landa is cooking real diamonds, using a process he likens to alchemy. "When will I retire?" Landa asked during an October recent interview with Calcalist. "My dream is that on my last day on earth, someone will want to enter the lab and find the door jammed. When they finally get it opened, they'll discover it was my dead body on the floor that blocked it." Read more

 

The last flu season

The promise of a universal vaccine, one that will be able to grant immunity despite the mutating nature of the virus, has long been the holy grail of flu researchers and public health institutions. A year from now, at the end of 2020, we might get there for the first time, thanks to Israeli company BiondVax Pharmaceuticals Ltd., currently holding phase 3 clinical trials for its universal influenza vaccine. Read more

 

Looking death in the eye

When he was 17, Yair Dor-Ziderman experienced the trauma of death in a particularly jarring way. In 1994, his childhood friend Arik Frankenthal, then a private in the Israeli military, was abducted and killed by Hamas. All he remembers now is feeling numb. Years later, Dor-Ziderman is researching the complex brain mechanisms that convince us that mortality is something that happens to other people. Read more   

The bio-hacker from the garage next door

From dogs that glow in the dark to people messing with their own genetic code: Israeli filmmaker Leeor Kaufman embarked on a journey to visit people who rewrite DNA using technology they ordered online for a few hundred dollars. Read more

 

Paving the way to Alzheimer's cure, one algorithm at a time

Israeli scientist Shahar Barbash is making waves in the pharmaceutical world with a new approach to image analysis that has even chemistry Nobel laureate Michael Levitt on board. One of the joys of being an old scientist is to encourage extraordinary young ones, Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist and a professor at Stanford University, said in a July interview with Calcalist. Read more 

Seven years in the belly of the beast

 

Sociology professor Peter Simi lived among U.S. white supremacy activists for seven years, and knows how they think, why they are rising in prominence, and maybe even how to stop them. Read more

 

A public company owes it to its shareholders to consider all options, says Mellanox CEO

 

No matter how you slice it, the $6.9 billion acquisition of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox Technologies Ltd. by Nvidia Corp. is the deal of 2019. Beyond being Nvidia's most expensive acquisition to date, it offered a 17% premium on Mellanox's market capitalization at the time, and is the second-largest exit in Israeli history, surpassed only by Intel's $15.3 billion acquisition of automotive chipmaker Mobileye two years prior. It is also an impressive second exit for CEO and co-founder Eyal Waldman, who owns 3.6% of Mellanox and is expected to receive nearly $260 million for his stake. Waldman spoke to Calcalist in September. Read more