Dr. Shulamit Levenberg
Unlocking the Secrets of Stem Cells
By Judy Siegel-Itzkovich

When Dr. Shulamit Levenberg is not busy cooking meals for her husband and five children in the kitchen of their Galilee home, the 37-year-old award-winning biomedical engineer is peering at glass dishes of human embryonic stem cells in her lab at Haifa’s Technion—Israel Institute of Technology.

Levenberg, whose oldest child is not yet 11 and whose youngest was born just a few months ago, has devoted her career to cutting-edge tissue engineering research that she hopes will eventually lead to the creation of lab-manufactured tissues and organs for transplants and the curing of degenerative diseases.

The use of tissue derived from spare embryos prepared for in-vitro fertilization is a controversial issue in the United States, where the Bush administration and conservative Christian groups restrict it, claiming that such research destroys life. But Jewish law does not view days-old embryos as being alive before implantation in the uterus, and in Israel, stem cell researchers’ work—with its potential to save lives—is encouraged.

Levenberg, at 18, chose to do two years of national service in a nature field school before earning her bachelor’s degree in biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her doctorate at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. A modern Orthodox Jew, she is motivated by her urge to “understand God’s work” and do her part to improve the world.

“This is not trying to partake of the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge that Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat in the Garden of Eden. It is comprehending the secrets of nature. We have an obligation to understand them better and to use them to help mankind,” she says.

Levenberg never felt discriminated against as a woman or as a religious Jew. “Women have to do everything better to compete. It’s hard to separate your career from your family life, but it is possible, and my husband—a computer expert turned Jewish educator—and our children have all supported me. Women need to be good at multitasking and making use of time.”

Although constructing a synthetic pancreas, heart or lung remains in the realm of science fiction for now, Levenberg and her colleagues are digging away at the problem bit by bit and believe that an earlier achievement will be to repair damaged brain, cartilage or muscle tissue.

While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston for five years of postdoctoral work, Levenberg built biological scaffolds to coax stem cells into developing into specific cell types. One of her most influential mentors, MIT professor Robert Langer, “taught me so much about lab research. He is an amazing, brilliant scientist who respects his students and gives them responsibility and independence.”

Stem cells, she adds, have great medical potential. “Understanding how they differentiate into different types of cells is a challenge and will supply a great deal of information on fetal development and the creation of blood vessels that nurture tissue.”

One day, she suggests, compatible stem cells might be taken from patients or blood or bone marrow banks to grow customized new organs and cure their diseases, eliminating the long wait for human donor organs and the risk of tissue rejection. “People won’t live forever, but they will live longer and enjoy a higher quality of life.”