Science and technology in Israel

[30] Israel's high-technology industries are a spin-off of the rapid development of computer science and technology in the 1980s in such places as Silicon Valley and Massachusetts Route 128 in the US, which ushered in the current high-tech era.

[31] This heavy investment in defense and aerospace formed the basis for Israel's high-tech industries in medical devices, electronics, telecommunications, computer software and hardware.

Thanks to generous government incentives and the availability of highly trained human capital, Israel has become an attractive location for the research and development centers of leading multinational corporations around the world.

Most of the physical development (e.g. buildings) and scientific infrastructure (e.g. laboratories and expensive equipment) of universities comes from philanthropic donations, primarily from the American Jewish community (CHE, 2014).

In the absence of a national policy for universities, let alone for the higher education system as a whole, it is not clear how these institutions will manage to supply the knowledge, skills and human resources needed for these new science-based industries.

In recent years, the Magnet administration in the Office of the Chief Scientist has initiated several evaluations of its own policy instruments, most of which have been carried out by independent research institutions.

The Office of the Chief Scientist accepted this recommendation and, consequently, decided to fund projects in the fields of medical devices, water and energy technology and multidisciplinary research.

In 2012, the ministry resolved to invest NIS 120 million over three years in four designated priority areas for research: brain science; supercomputing and cybersecurity; oceanography; and alternative transportation fuels.

An expert panel headed by the Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Science, Technology and Space chose these four broad disciplines in the belief that they would be likely to exert the greatest practical impact on Israeli life in the near future.

[1] The main ongoing programmes managed by the Israel Innovation Authority, Previously known as the Office of the Chief Scientist within the Ministry of the Economy are: the R&D (Research and Development) Fund; Magnet Tracks (est.

The programme plans to leverage Israeli expertise in information and communication technologies (ICTs) to accelerate economic growth, reduce socio-economic disparities and make governance smarter, faster and citizen-friendlier.

In 2012, Yuval Katzenelson of Kiryat Gat won first prize with a paper entitled "Kinetic energy of inert gas in a regenerative system of activated carbon."

This evolution has been a corollary of the rise of the electronics industry and information technology services, along with a surge in the number of research personnel following the wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union.

[1] In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly's Economic and Financial Committee adopted an Israeli-sponsored draft resolution on agricultural technology transfer to developing countries.

This includes increasing the resources of the Israel Patent Office, upgrading enforcement activities and implementing programmes to bring ideas funded by government research to the market.

This preference for USPTO is largely because foreign research centres implanted in Israel are primarily owned by US firms such as IBM, Intel, Sandisk, Microsoft, Applied Materials, Qualcomm, Motorola, Google or Hewlett–Packard.

[70] The Arrow Ecology company has developed the ArrowBio process a patented system which takes trash directly from collection trucks and separates organic and inorganic materials through gravitational settling, screening, and hydro-mechanical shredding.

[72] In 2011, the government asked the Academy of Sciences and Humanities to convene a panel of experts to consider the full range of implications of the most recent discoveries of natural gas.

[75] Israel became the eighth nation in the world to have an orbital launch capability when it deployed its first satellite, Ofeq-1, using the locally built Shavit launch vehicle on September 19, 1988, and has made contributions in a number of areas in space research, including laser communication, research into embryo development and osteoporosis in space, pollution monitoring, and mapping geology, soil and vegetation in semi-arid environments.

[86] Israel's agricultural sector is characterized by an intensive system of production stemming from the need to overcome the scarcity in natural resource, particularly water and arable land, in a country where more than half of its area is desert.

Israeli farmers rely heavily on greenhouse technology to ensure a constant, year-round supply of high quality produce, while overcoming the obstacles posed by adverse climatic conditions, and water and land shortages.

Israeli firms include Check Point, the creators of the first commercial firewall; Amdocs, which makes business and operations support systems for telecoms; Comverse, a voice-mail company; and Mercury Interactive, which measures software performance.

Intel,[95] Microsoft,[96] and Apple[97][98] built their first overseas research and development centers in Israel, and other high-tech multi-national corporations, such as IBM, Cisco Systems, and Motorola, have opened facilities in the country.

[103] In November 2010, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu entrusted a task force with responsibility for formulating national plans to place Israel among the top five countries in the world for cybersecurity.

The system was created as a defensive countermeasure to the rocket threat against Israel's civilian population on its northern and southern borders, and was declared operational and initially deployed in the first quarter of 2011.

Biotechnology, biomedical, and clinical research account for over half of the country's scientific publications, and the industrial sector has used this extensive knowledge to develop pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and treatment therapies.

[122] In 2011, Israeli scientist Inbar Friedrich Ben-Nun led a team which produced the first stem cells from endangered species, a breakthrough that could save animals in danger of extinction.

Other innovations include a controlled-release liquid polymer to prevent accumulation of tooth plaque, a device to reduce both benign and malignant swellings of the prostate gland, the use of botulin to correct eye squint, and a miniature camera encased in a swallowable capsule used to diagnose gastrointestinal disease,[121] developed by Given Imaging.

[125] MeMic Medical LTD. founded in 2012 received its FDA approval in 2021 for its robotic platform for natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) for myomectomy through the vagina.

[126] In 2009, scientists from several European countries and Israel developed a robotic prosthetic hand, called SmartHand, which functions like a real one, allowing patients to write with it, type on a keyboard, play piano and perform other fine movements.