Jerusalem: An Open Letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu,

We're neighbors, and in the past we've exchanged greetings.

I'm not a member of the Likud party, and I don't think I ever voted for the Likud, owing to my middle-of-the-road leanings. Which is not to say that other members of my household haven't voted for you: As is commonly said, where there are two Jews, there are three opinions.

I would like to say a few personal words to you about the Ramat Shlomo crisis - or "non-crisis" as it is now being called - with the United States. It has me enraged.

I don't think Ramat Shlomo is a "non-crisis", given the orchestrated demonization of Israel resulting from and facilitated by this matter. It is indeed a full-blown crisis, albeit a manufactured to order crisis: After you apologized in private and in public to Vice President Biden, the matter seemed to have subsided until someone in the Obama administration decided to stir it up for political leverage.

The Obama administration made a calculated decision that the announcement by the Jerusalem planning commission of the theoretical future construction of 1,600 apartments in a Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem, which will remain part of Israel as part of any two-state settlement agreement, should be used to extract negotiating concessions from your government. Regarding Israel’s construction policy in East Jerusalem, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, wrote in an op-ed, entitled "For Israel and America, a Disagreement, Not a Crisis", in today's New York Times:

That policy is not Mr. Netanyahu’s alone but was also that of former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Golda Meir — in fact of every Israeli government going back to the city’s reunification in 1967. Consistently, Israel has held that Jerusalem should remain its undivided capital and that both Jews and Arabs have the right to build anywhere in the city.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/opinion/18oren.html

Mike Oren, with whom I served in the army and whom I admire, would also characterize Ramat Shlomo as a "disagreement", i.e. a non-crisis. A mere disagreement? Note the following language in an article entitled "Israel Seeks to Mend Rift With the U.S." from The New York Times:

The United States was still waiting for a response from Israel to a number of demands made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in a telephone call last Friday, including a halt to new building projects in East Jerusalem and other acts that could be deemed provocative in the delicate atmosphere surrounding the peace talks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/world/middleeast/18mideast.html?hp

Without a favorable response, you are being denied permission to meet with Hillary or Vice President Biden next week in the United States. Peace talks? There are no peace talks. As reported by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Obama has made it known to all that he does not like you, that he doesn't think you're bright, and that he is seeking Israeli regime change. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/03/what-obama-is-actually-trying-to-do-in-israel/37548/

Obama will obviously squeeze Israel for all its worth without requiring anything from the Palestinian Authority. Concerning the demands being made solely of Israel, I cannot say it better than Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt:

"Why was Abbas’ refusal to accept the US request and Israeli offer for direct negotiations not an 'insult and affront' to the United States and the Vice President?

Why was Assad’s meeting with Ahmadinejad the day after the US announced that we were sending an ambassador to Syria ignored by the State Department and not deemed to be an 'insult and affront' to the United States?

Why is Palestinian Authority incitement of rioters in Jerusalem and elsewhere not condemned by this administration and not an 'insult and affront' to the United States and the Vice President?

Why is the naming of the main public square in Ramallah by Abbas in honor of Fatah terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, murderer of 38 Israelis - 13 of them little kids not an impediment to the peace process and not an insult and affront to the US and Israel????

Not to mention – why does this administration insist on viewing construction in a vacant piece of land, adjacent to existing housing seen as thwarting the two state solution?"

http://weeklystandard.com/blogs/friends-do-not-treat-friends-manner

Obama now is also claiming that Ramat Shlomo is a non-crisis and professing his friendship:

“'Israel’s one of our closes allies,' [Obama] told Fox News. 'The Israeli people have a special bond and it’s not going to go away.'

However, the US president said that the new housing units 'weren't helpful' in carving out a peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

The expansion of Ramat Shlomo was a poor choice for Israel, Obama said, but added that, 'friends are going to disagree sometimes.'

'What we've said is we need both sides to take steps to make sure that we can rebuild trust,' he said. 'What we need right now is both sides to recognize that it is in their interests to move this peace process forward.'"

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=171252

Well, I've got news for you: Obama is no "friend" of Israel. Friends engage in discussion without preconditions. Friends attempt to iron out their differences without inciting others to riot. Friends do not engage in blackmail.

Obama will not agree to allow you to meet next week with Hillary or Vice President Biden in the U.S. if you do not make the concessions that they are demanding? No disaster. Let Obama continue with his policy of undermining friends while appeasing enemies, i.e. the Obama Doctrine. Israel's friendship with the United States, premised upon common underpinnings of democracy and freedom, will remain intact.

Yours sincerely,
Jeffrey

[Three rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza over the past 24 hours. The last qassam rocket killed a Thai agricultural worker. Obama stands responsible for legitimizing this renewed violence; the blood is on his hands.]

Netanyahu and Biden Talk Again, But the Damage Has Already Been Done

As reported by Haaretz, Netanyahu and Biden spoke yesterday in order to bring some sense of normalcy back to the relationship between Israel and the U.S.:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden spoke on the phone Tuesday night in a bid to ease tensions between the U.S. and Israel over a plan to construct 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem.

The New York Times also said that the American administration had confirmed the conversation. The Prime Minister's Bureau did not elaborate on the details of the conversation, which lasted until 2 A.M. Netanyahu's advisers Yitzhak Molcho and Ron Dermer, along with Israeli envoy to the U.S. Michael Oren, were also present.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1157020.html

Ambassador Mike Oren is also now claiming he never said that the U.S./Israel relationship had hit a 35-year nadir. Regardless of what Mike did or did not say, the U.S./Israel relationship will recover. What will not recover, however, is whatever was left of the international dignity and prestige of the Obama administration.

Too many commentators have now noted that Obama is tough on friends and easy on enemies, i.e. what I refer to as the "Obama Doctrine". Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic is even saying, based on discussions with White House insiders, that the purpose of this manufactured crisis was to bring about regime change in Israel (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/03/what-obama-is-actually-trying-to-do-in-israel/37548/), something Obama did not dare attempt in Iran for fear of being accused of meddling, but something Obama was willing to do to harm allies in Honduras.

Who in the Obama administration took the lead role in blowing this crisis over 1,600 theoretical apartments out of all proportion? No one is willing to take the blame. It is interesting to observe that there have been no direct conversations between Obama and Netanyahu intended to straighten out this mess.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to observe the reception that Hillary receives when she addresses a plenary session at the AIPAC Policy Conference next week.

Take the Middle East IQ Test: Are You Smarter Than Obama?

So you think you know a lot about the Middle East? Okay, today you're going to match wits with the patented, JG Caesarea, Middle East IQ Test in order to determine if you're smarter than President Obama. Ready for the first question? Here it comes:

What was the most significant event that transpired last week in the Middle East?

By any chance, was your initial thought: The announcement by the Jerusalem district planning commission to approve the construction of 1,600 housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of East Jerusalem during U.S. Vice President Biden's visit to Israel? Sorry, but it's already a non-event, notwithstanding Ambassador Mike Oren's characterization of the occurrence as the biggest U.S./Israel crisis in the past 35 years. Had it not been for: 1) Netanyahu's failure to nip the problem in the bud (he obviously didn't take Leadership 101, see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/search/label/leadership) and, 2) the decision of the boys from Chicago to milk this "crisis" for all it's worth in order to ring concessions from the Israelis, this non-event would have been yesterday's news. PR man Axelrod, however, sees Ramat Shlomo as an opportunity to squeeze the Israelis into being more amenable to Palestinian demands, but what Axelrod and friends still don't understand is that no matter what Israel is willing to concede, the graft-ridden Palestinian Authority is not ready to acknowledge Israel's right to exist.

What else happened last week? On Saturday night, Walid Jumblatt, Lebanese Druze leader and head of the Progressive Socialist party, issued a formal apology to Syrian President Bashar Assad for past criticism of Bashar. Walid Jumblatt, whose father, Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, was murdered by the Syrians in 1977 upon orders of Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, and who for many years had been allied with Western-leaning politicians in Lebanon, is now suing for peace with the tyrannical Syrian regime:

"One of Syria’s harshest critics in Lebanon in the past, Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) leader MP Walid Jumblatt said Saturday his criticism of Syrian President Bashar Assad was 'improper' as he called for a new page in relations between the two countries.

Jumblatt’s harshest verbal attack against Assad came on February 14, 2007, in a speech marking former Premier Rafik Hariri’s assassination, calling the Syrian leader a 'snake' and a 'tyrant' and demanding revenge against him.

'These comments were improper, unfamiliar and unsuited to political ethics,' Jumblatt said in a live interview with Al-Jazeera satellite channel late Saturday.

. . . .

Jumblatt was a major figure of the March 14 alliance that led massive street protests to demand the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon following Hariri’s assassination.

The Syrians pulled their army out of Lebanon in April 2005 ending nearly three decades of domination of their smaller neighbor. After the 2005 break with Damascus, Jumblatt became a staunch critic of Syria in Lebanon, calling for the overthrow of Assad’s regime and blaming Syria for the 1977 killing of his father."

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=112734

Jumblatt's overtures to Syria come on the heels of the December 2009 visit to Syria of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whose father, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was assassinated in 2005 upon orders of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Following Obama's recent overtures to Damascus by way of appointment of a new ambassador to Syria, a post left vacant for five years following Rafik Hariri's assassination, both Saad Hariri and pragmatist Jumblatt now feel they have no choice other than to bow to a monster no longer to be kept in check by the U.S.

So what was the most significant piece of Middle East news last week? Yes, you're right, Jumblatt's apology to Assad, and indeed, you know more about the Middle East than Obama. What? I cheated and handed you the answer? I have news for you (something else that Obama and friends have yet to discover): As you should now know from the above, no one plays fair in the Middle East.

More patented, JG Caesarea, Middle East IQ Test questions to follow in the future.

Maureen Dowd Ignores "Honor Killings" in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia and Iran are engaged in a bloody, largely unreported war in the northwest Saada province of Yemen. Needless to say, this protracted conflagration went unmentioned by Maureen Dowd in her ongoing series of op-eds concerning Saudi Arabia. Few realize that enmity between Sunni and Shiite Muslims has cost an exponentially larger number of lives than all of the combined Israeli/Arab conflicts.

However, notwithstanding their ongoing battle in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iran share one thing in common: oppression of women and "honor killings". How remarkable that both Roger Cohen, during his protracted series of op-eds concerning Iran, and Maureen Dowd, during her current series on Saudi Arabia, both saw fit to ignore the practice of "honor killings" in their host countries.

In an op-ed in today's New York Times entitled "Driving Miss Saudi" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14dowd.html?hp), Dowd, according to The Times, observes how "Young women in Riyadh try to balance Islam and modernity as the stunted desert kingdom makes progress in 'Saudi Time'", but doesn't dare breathe a word concerning the horrifying practice of "honor killings". My online response, if posted by The Times:

Maureen Dowd is out of Saudi Arabia, but still writing pap, protective of her Saudi hosts. Reading this op-ed, one is made to believe that Saudi oppression of women amounts to little more than a dress code. The reality is quite different. According to a recent item appearing in Arabian Business:

"A Saudi women's group on Friday blamed the country's religious police in the 'honour' killing of two sisters shot dead by their own brother after they were arrested for mixing with unrelated men.

The Society for Defending Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia said the religious police had placed the sisters' lives in danger when they arrested them and then placed them in a Riyadh women's shelter.

The two women, identified as Reem, 21, and Nouf, 19, were murdered after they left the shelter on July 5.

The brother shot them in the presence of their father who, according to newspaper reports, quickly forgave the son for defending the family's honour."

How could Maureen Dowd write about discrimination against Saudi women without mentioning even once the practice of "honor killing"? Ms. Dowd, time to stop the charade! Shame on you!

I asked Andrew Rosenthal, with whom I have corresponded in the past, to be provided with the opportunity to rebut Dowd, but thus far Mr. Rosenthal has ignored my request.

Jerusalem and the Obama Doctrine: Appease Your Enemies, Undermine Your Friends

I was appalled by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai's announcement regarding the intention to build 1,600 new apartments in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. The timing of the announcement, which caused Netanyahu great embarrassment during the visit of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden to Israel, was labeled by Yishai a "technical matter", and Yishai claimed that he had no intention of insulting the U.S. The apartments in Ramat Shlomo, however, are intended for ultra-Orthodox Jews, i.e. Yishai's Shas Party constituency, and there was nothing accidental about the timing of this announcement. I despise Shas, whose leadership has been associated with no small number of scandals in the past, and even Yishai should know better than to anger Israel's principal ally.

Yishai's announcement blindsided Netanyahu and placed him in a bind: The Israeli government’s ban on Jewish building on the West Bank does not apply to East Jerusalem, where, for example, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the Wailing Wall, Judaism's holiest site, are located, and any forthright condemnation of Yishai by Netanyahu would also have jeopardized Netanyahu's standing with his right wing constituency. The undertakings provided by Netanyahu concerning a moratorium on construction also in East Jerusalem had, of political necessity, been tacit. What to do? Netanyahu personally apologized to Biden, explained to Biden that construction of these apartments was not imminent, and coordinated with the U.S. vice president a public apology.

For Obama, however, Netanyahu's apologies were not enough. Obama gave explicit instructions to Hillary to call Netanyahu to express his personal outrage. As reported by The New York Times:

"In a tense, 43-minute phone call on Friday morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s plan for new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem sent a 'deeply negative signal' about Israeli-American relations, and not just because it spoiled a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/world/middleeast/13diplo.html?hp

Observe what is reported first by The Times: The phone call lasted 43 minutes. Are we to understand that someone stood beside Hillary with a stopwatch in order to time the conversation? For whose benefit is this extraneous information intended? Obviously, it is meant for consumption by the Muslim Middle East, which Obama is still intent on appeasing. Obama, notwithstanding his failed overtures to Syria and Iran, still does not understand that his would-be friends respond to strength, not weakness, and this public castigation of a longstanding ally, guilty of a misdemeanor, will only serve to harden the intransigence of the Palestinian Authority and might even spark renewed violence - of the kind we saw yesterday.

But more to the point, Iran continues its pursuit of nuclear weapons unimpeded by Obama, millions are dying in the Congo, and Obama's most pressing foreign policy concern is the announcement of the construction of 1,600 apartments at some unknown future date within an existing Jewish community of Jerusalem. This is what will prevent a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which has yet to recognize the legitimacy of Israel within any borders whatsoever?

Five thousand more Jews in East Jerusalem in several more years, should it ever happen? What a horror story! Can you imagine the scandal if Israel were officially to deny Israeli Arabs the right to live in Jewish neighborhoods. It is indeed peculiar - or not so peculiar - how Israel, of all Middle Eastern countries, is branded "apartheid".

Sure, I support a two-state solution, a return to the 1967 boundaries with land swaps as necessary, and a moratorium involving West Bank construction, but does this mean that the Palestinian state must be without Jews, i.e. Judenfrei? Ultimately, when the Palestinian state comes into being, we will all need to learn to live together harmoniously in close proximity.

Wouldn't it be a wonderful surprise if only once Obama could find the courage to challenge the human rights records of China, Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria or North Korea? Instead, his administration is intent upon undermining the relationships of the U.S. with such longstanding friends as Poland, the Czech Republic, Honduras, Japan and Israel.

Meanwhile, not surprisingly, the EU's head of foreign policy, the hideous Baroness Catherine Ashton, has chosen this opportunity to declare that improved trade relations between Israel and the EU are contingent upon Israel making immediate peace with the Palestinians. There was no concomitant demand from Ashton that the Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist.

Afghanistan: You Can't Buy Love

In an op-ed in today's New York Times entitled "Getting Obama Right" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/opinion/12brooks.html?ref=opinion), David Brooks writes:

"To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate."

Anyone reading the Brooks' op-ed would be led to understand that Obama is succeeding in his Afghan war. Remember Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now?: "It smells like . . . victory." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPXVGQnJm0w). At least so it seems to Brooks viewing the world from a New York high-rise.

Meanwhile, however, from Afghanistan a different picture emerges. Alissa J. Rubin, also writing today for The Times from Jalalabad, informs us in an item entitled "Afghan Tribal Rivalries Bedevil a U.S. Plan":

"Six weeks ago, elders of the Shinwari tribe, which dominates a large area in southeastern Afghanistan, pledged that they would set aside internal differences to focus on fighting the Taliban. This week, that commitment seemed less important as two Shinwari subtribes took up arms to fight each other over an ancient land dispute, leaving at least 13 people dead, according to local officials.

. . . .

In return for the tribe’s pledge [to fight the Taliban], the Americans are offering cash-for-work programs to employ large numbers of young people from the tribe as well as small-scale development projects, according to Maj. T. J. Taylor, a public affairs officer.

The one initial worry was that the Taliban might try to drive a wedge between different factions within the tribe, which includes about 400,000 people. The land dispute may have done that work for the insurgents.

. . . .

'We promised to work with the government to fight the Taliban,' said Hajji Gul Nazar, an elder from the Mohmand branch of the Shinwari tribe. He added, 'Well, the government officials should have taken care of this argument among us before the shooting started.' 'We are the same tribe, and we are not happy killing each other,' he said. 'The provincial police chief and the governor should have taken care of this issue.'

. . . .

Elders from the Khogyani, another local tribe, met with 100 elders from each of the feuding subtribes to participate in a peace shura to defuse tensions.

'I don’t think the shura will work,' said Hajji Gul Nazar, a Mohmand elder who was not able to attend the shura. 'The Alisher have lost people and have so many wounded, and lots of their tents were burned by our people, and motorcycles were burned, and cars. They must be waiting to take revenge on us.'”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?hp

So now the U.S. has taken to buying the loyalty of Afghan tribesmen. The U.S. also sought to recruit the Degar (Montagnard) of the Central Highlands of Vietnam, but the tactic changed nothing. You can't eliminate tribalism overnight and buy love and loyalty; tribalism has its own own agenda.

Does the U.S. intend to continue to pay Afghans to undertake menial jobs after American troops withdraw in just over a year? How long can the U.S. maintain their loyalty? Any decision by Afghans to lay down their lives in the fight against the Taliban must stem from a higher motivation than money.

By the way, the "shura" mentioned in Ms. Rubin's article? Much akin to the ancient tribal dispute resolution system known as "sulha" (from the Arabic word for "peace making"), which predates Mohammed, and which is practiced throughout the Muslim Middle East. Both the shura and the sulha are intended to provide a mechanism to terminate feuds, taking into account local notions of honor and shame.

You Read The Da Vinci Code? Now Watch the Compugen Code

You like to go to the movies? I do, too, and some of those that I have enjoyed fall within a genre of treasure hunt films, including Romancing the Stone, National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code, just to name a few.

The Da Vinci Code? If you read the book or saw the movie based upon the novel, you will recall how Robert Langdon, a professor of religious symbology, deciphers a series of puzzles and anagrams, solves a murder, eludes would-be killers, possibly finds love, and discovers that the "Grail" is buried beneath the pyramid of the Louvre, all within the course of days. The Da Vinci Code is of course fictional. I would suggest that there is a real-life treasure hunt being pursued for almost a decade, involving the deciphering of billion-year old riddles, which can be watched as it systematically unfolds: how life "works" on the molecular level.

When did the real treasure hunt begin? Perhaps you remember many years ago the excitement surrounding the discovery of a single gene and the scientific value attributed to its occurrence. But now consider the value of the discovery of a single gene today, without knowing the proteins and peptides it can generate and without any clue how to modulate its activity. The mystery of life is far more complex than anyone imagined some 20 years ago, and almost all the corporations who initially joined in this treasure hunt have long since abandoned the pursuit.

Given my love for movies, I believe an analogy to the situation existing when the treasure hunt began can be drawn to the "tutsi fruitsi ice cream" scene of The Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LBIsDBC848). Watch as Chico sells Groucho the code, ZVBXRPL, for the winner of the next horse race. Groucho soon discovers that without the Code Book, which Chico then sells him, he cannot decipher the code. However, understanding the Code Book, requires – at a price – the Master Code Book, which requires the Breeders' Guide, which requires the Jockeys Manual, which ultimately leads, at great expense and much frustration, to a losing horse.

Unlike other companies that joined and then abandoned the chase, Compugen has persisted in its pursuit of this elusive quarry, discovering on the way that there are no shortcuts and that each of the interlocking pieces of the puzzle is as intricate as the next. Examples of the pieces of the puzzle: correlated mutations, intramolecular segment interactions, large scale genetic variation, pseudogenes, protein folding, cleavage sites, viral piracy and antisense. The code is not binary, i.e. the basis of life is not found in a series of "0s" and "1s", as in computer science. Rather, four nucleic acids – adenine ("A"), cytosine ("C"), guanine ("G") and thymine ("T") - provide the building blocks for all our DNA blueprints, which encode our RNA, which translate into proteins, many of which cleave into peptides. Similar, however, to computer science which was spawned by man, the language of life is also mathematics.

Compugen's treasure hunt began with a better understanding of alternative splicing. Whereas once it was thought that for every gene there is one protein, Compugen correctly predicted that a little known phenomenon known as alternative splicing, whereby one gene gives rise to more than one protein, was far more prevalent than commonly thought. Ultimately, Compugen would discover that this phenomenon occurs in more than 80% of all human genes. But this was hardly enough to provide an understanding of life at the molecular level, which requires the integration of additional biological phenomena, resulting from billions of years of mutation and evolution.

Further evidence of Compugen's progress? Pseudogenes, ancient relatives of known functional genes, have lost their protein-coding ability and were tossed into the category of "junk DNA". In 2006 Compugen announced that its predictive methodology had been shown to use pseudogene sequences as blueprints for new gene variants and, thus, novel transcripts and proteins, resulting in new therapeutic candidates.

But the discoveries involving pseudogenes were still only the beginning. Peptide therapeutics, among the hottest fields of drug discovery today, were facilitated by new technologies for their synthesis. However, peptides, which are protein fragments, cannot be predicted without knowing protein cleavage sites. Compugen mapped both the human proteome and peptidome, and created new discovery platforms, e.g., the GPCR peptide ligand discovery platform (2007), providing access to a host of new peptide therapeutic candidates which can be discovered on demand.

The DAC Blockers platform (2008)? Proteins fold and sometimes assume disease associated conformations. Compugen, as the result of its evolutionary knowledge involving the loci of mutations, is able to predict peptides, which can bind with the protein at the appropriate location and prevent the folding of the protein.

The ultimate objective of Compugen's treasure hunt? That's obvious: You. I'm not referring to the blue eyes or blood type that you inherited from your parents. Rather, I am asking why you don't tolerate penicillin, or why you suffer from IBD? Why are you aging faster or slower than your peer group? Are you destined to become ill with lung cancer even if you don't smoke? More to the point, why are you different from every human being that ever lived, and how might it be possible to intervene to ensure you a healthier, happier life with a new crop of diagnostics and therapeutics premised upon rational scientific prediction?

The Compugen Code? A small group of the world's top scientists, including persons who spent many collective years in the Israeli army breaking secret codes, are now busy deciphering the secrets of life. This is a project infinitely more complicated than the plot of The Da Vinci Code, nevertheless significant progress has been made, as evidenced by cutting edge discovery platforms and promising therapeutic and diagnostic candidates used to validate these platforms. No one is dying in the chase after life's secrets, and there is no crazy albino monk hot on the trail of Compugen's scientists, but take the time to read their story and watch for the discoveries as they are periodically reported. Chances are you will find this real-life thriller even more fascinating than that of Dan Brown.

If you follow the Compugen Code, you are not going to discover the burial site of Mary Magdalene. On the other hand, you just might be able to learn the secrets of a code extending back billions of years and perhaps touch, depending upon your theological orientation and outlook, something divine.

[As noted in prior blog entries, I am a Compugen shareholder, this blog entry is not a recommendation to buy or sell Compugen shares, and in mid-September 2009 I began work as a part-time external consultant to Compugen. The opinions expressed herein are mine and are based on publicly available information. This blog entry has not been authorized or approved by Compugen.]