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Published 24 June 2013 by Akshat Rathi

Without my science, I’m a dead man

Aaron Ciechanover’s office is full of odd objects. A picture of Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellie Wiesel stands next to an advertisement for a sushi place in Tokyo. There are models of a VW Beetle, a double-decker London bus and even a Vespa. The music playing in the background is soothing and his voice, when he speaks to me, is crisp.

He also gave me a tour of his lab at the Technion University in Haifa, Israel. The building is right by the coast and provides picturesque views of the Mediterranean Sea. Between doing experiments, students in his lab also introduced themselves and gave a hint about what they are working on.

Aaron Ciechanover by the Mediterranean Sea

Standing by the coast, Ciechanover who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry says, “Without my science, I’m a dead man. My curiosity to understand the world is oxygen to me.”

All this I know not because I visited Ciechanover in Haifa, but because I have just spent the last hour exploring Nobel Labs 360. An excellent place to meet Nobel laureates on their home ground. You can visit John Mather (Physics 2011) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, Brian Schmidt (Physics 2011) in his vineyard in Canberra (or hooting in a burnt telescope), Danny Shectman (Chemistry 2011) in the Bahai Gardens or Oliver Smithies (Medicine 2007) make gold nanoparticles.

Google’s Street View has made 360 images a common feature these days, but the Nobel Labs 360 takes it further by embedding video and audio. The ambient sounds add to your experience and it definitely feels like you are present where all the action is happening.

I don’t want to give away any more. Go to Nobel Labs 360 now: http://nobellabs.lindau-nobel.org/hf_aaronciechanover/index.html

Akshat Rathi

Akshat Rathi is a reporter for Quartz (http://qz.com) in London. He has previously worked at The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.