Daniel Gavron, a Jerusalem writer,  asks bluntly on a recent op-ed page of the New York Times: “We have won the battle for survival. Why aren’t we celebrating?”

Gabriele Schoenfeld, also of Jerusalem, answers Gavron on the Letters page:  “We will win when we no longer have to attend a funeral of young Israelis murdered by terrorists while hiking,“ she writes.

And from a suburb of Jerusalem Stuart Pilchowski writes: “ I don’t know where Daniel Gavron lives but the Israel I live is being rocketed daily by Qassams and targeted regularly by suicide bombers.”

In his op-ed piece Gavron balances the  threats from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas with the agreement by the Palestine Authority to negotiate peace with Israel.  He writes:

 “Far more significantly, Fatah, the official Palestinian leadership, is negotiating peace with Israel. The member states of the Arab League, headed by Saudi Arabia" have recognized Israel within its pre-1967 borders. And the world’s only superpower, the United States, supports Israel in every way.

I like Gavron because he has published a book in England called Holy Land Mosaic. Stories of Cooperation and Coexistence Between Israelis and Palestinians. It contains three chapters on three organizations that I support: the original bilingual school for Jews and Arabs at Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam, the Oasis of Peace, which I built many years ago; the four Hand-in-Hand Jewish-Arab schools in Jerusalem, Galilee, Beersheba and Wadi Ara; and the original Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus which serves the Arabs in East Jerusalem.

I will mark Israel’s 6oth birthday by concentrating on Israel’s magnificent achievements in medical science and,  in particular, on a new and revolutionary branch called “regenerative medicine.”

I was introduced to  regenerative medicine by Professor Dan Gazit of the Hebrew University only a few weeks ago at a meeting in Palm Beach of the American Friends of Hebrew University. I had never heard of the term before.

So on my computer I googled “regenerative medicine” and I learned that  more than a dozen universities have founded institutes to investigate possible therapies by embryonic stem cells, that is lines of stem cells taken from human embryos that otherwise would have been destroyed.

Prof. Gazit avoids all controversy over the use of human embryos. He will take stem cells directly from the patient to engineer new tissue in the patient. He is concentrating on the bone, the spine and skeleton. He showed a diagram of a spinal fusion in which cement is injected to fuse two vertebrae. How much better it would be if he could inject stem cells instead to bind the bones together.

Ultimately, he hopes to be able to cure osteoporosis. But so far he has been working mainly  with animals.

A week after hearing Professor Gazit, I received the February issue of Hadassah Magazine from which I retired as editor and publisher twenty-four years ago.  The monthly medical article by Wendy Elliman was titled “Making Bones About it.”

In his presentation in Palm Beach, Professor Gazit did not mention that his colleagues in the Orthopedic Department of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center at Ein Karim are ready to begin a clinical trial of stem cell bone therapy in human beings.

Wendy Elliman quotes Dr. Meir Liebergall, chief surgeon of Hadassah’s Orthopedic Department. He told her:

“Twenty-four young adults, most of them road accident victims with fractures that are of high risk of healing improperly, either because of location, infection or devascularization of the bone, will volunteer for the study.”

All of them will have their fractures set in Hadassah’s operating rooms. Then a dozen, the control group, will be sent home to heal, the current method. The other twelve will be injected with stem cells that have been extracted from the patient’s bone marrow.

“We expect to show,” says Dr. Liebergall,  “that injecting MSC (the stem cells) into the fracture site is an answer for fractures that heal improperly and for those that heal slowly.”

I expect he’s right. Hadassah has discovered a way to extract the few stem cells from bone marrow and to use them to heal fractures better and faster. None of the many other institutions working with stem cells has advanced this far.

“Bone repair is an ideal candidate for stem cell therapy because it enhances a natural repair process,” says Dr. Liebergall.

“Harnessing the healing potential of stem cells will benefit patients of all ages whether their need is joint replacement or spinal fusion or repair of the ravages of war or terror.”

In Israel medicine, Hadassah, as usual, leads the way.

P.S.  Recently Felix Pierson of Boynton Beach, a survisor of Auschwitz, angrily rejected my contention in a previous article that because of the lack of precision bombs it would have been impossible to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz.

I asked my frind Jules Horowitz, who flew fifty missions over Europe, for his opinion. He said:

“When I was flying in 1943 and 1944 I had never heard of Auschwitz. Could we have bombed the tracks? Yes we could. If we had bombed the entire area we would have hit the tracks and everything else in the area. Should we have bombed it? No we should not have because bombed tracks were fixed in 24 hours. The air force suffered tremendous losses. Over a third of the B-17s were shot down with 100,000 casualties. No commander would risk his planes and crews to bomb tracks would could be repaired overnight.”

Lurie's column also appears in the Jewish Journal of South Florida





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