Pano Kanelos

Subscribers to Bari Weiss’s popular Substack newsletter “Common Sense” received an email last week announcing a new, as-yet-unaccredited liberal arts college called the University of Austin. The school will restore “open inquiry and civil discourse” in education at a time of “censoriousness,” according to an essay by its founding president, Pano Kanelos, who most recently served as president of St. John’s College, a liberal arts school in Annapolis, Md. Contrary to the claims of some critics, Kanelos said the goal is not to create a safe space for conservative thinkers. “If everybody at University of Austin, or most people, are on the right or on either end of the political spectrum, if it’s so dominated in one way or the other, we will have failed,” Kanelos told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch in an interview Friday from his home in Austin, where he moved this summer.

Hard and fast lines: “If [students] tried to shut down an event, then of course there’d be consequences. I think objecting to and protesting something is totally fine. But there are hard and fast lines. If we’re an institution that stands for civil discourse, anybody who’s acting outside the bounds of civil discourse is transgressing one of our fundamental tenets. We want speech to be as open and expansive and elastic as possible. But you can only have broad-ranging discussions and ideas if you all agree that nobody is allowed to prevent others from expressing their opinions.”

Culture of trust: “The most pressing issues that we have in our society, the ones that we’re really wrestling with — it’s the role of universities to provide a way for society to engage and work through those issues. It’s not to want to embrace controversy, or be contrarian. We always talk about dialogue. If we don’t have somewhere where that actually can happen, then we’re at a stalemate. And we see the kind of polarization that we have today. I think issues like gender or race, things that are very much on the forefront of everybody’s mind, can be discussed if we create a culture of trust and a culture of openness and grace.”

The other university in Austin: “My dream would be that we could become, like, the Stanford to [the University of Texas at Austin’s] Berkeley. There’s a world-class public institution here, and if we can have a complimentary world-class private institution, I think that would be wonderful.”

Who’s who: The university’s founding trustees include Weiss; the historian Niall Ferguson; Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist who has garnered attention recently for remaining unvaccinated against COVID-19; and Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir and managing partner at the venture capital fund 8VC and the university’s main financial supporter. Its board of advisors includes some conservative figures, such as Harvard professor and former American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks and the activist and researcher Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but other notable members include former ACLU President Nadine Strossen and former Harvard President Larry Summers.

Read the full interview here.

Israel Energy Minister Karine Elharrar arrives for a group portrait with incoming Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, outgoing President Reuvin Rivlin, and her fellow cabinet ministers in the new government, on June 14, 2021 in Jerusalem.

With the pressures of addressing climate change falling to politicians around the world, in Israel it is Karine Elharrar, a relative newcomer to environmental issues, who is feeling the heat. The 44-year-old minister of national infrastructure, energy and water resources, who earned a reputation for championing social causes in Israel’s Knesset, is determined to figure out a way to have Israel pivot away from fossil fuels. “From my perspective, Israel’s biggest challenge is in transitioning to green energy,” Elharrar told Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash in a recent interview. “We live in a region that is very reliant on old forms of energy — oil, gas and petroleum — and we need to become a green arrow in this field.”

Amazing Opportunity: Taking on the planet’s biggest challenges might seem like a surprising career swerve for a politician who, for the last eight years, focused more on matters of education, welfare and health, but when Yesh Atid received this portfolio as part of the coalition deal back in June, Elharrar, who joined the party in 2012, said it was the office that “spoke to me to the most…. I wanted something different. It is an amazing ministry that involves issues of security, geopolitics, foreign policy [and] economics, and I felt it was an amazing opportunity, even though many people do not even know what we do.”

Key player: As the new government, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, prioritizes finding ways to tackle the global climate crisis at home, Elharrar’s portfolio — the Energy Ministry for short — will become a key component. And Elharrar, who has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair — and who made international headlines earlier this month after being unable to physically access the summit in Glasgow, Scotland — will be a key player.

Breaking barriers: “Israel has some amazing innovators with incredible abilities, and we need to take advantage of this,” Elharrar told JI. “There are so many pioneers who get initial assistance here, but end up leaving for the U.S. or Europe to continue their work. We need to fix this problem and stop them from leaving.” She believes Israel must break down bureaucratic barriers that prevent innovators from developing and implementing their work in the country, including access to land, permits and basic resources and create what she described as a “one-stop shop that can help innovators not only invent their ideas in Israel, but also develop and build them here too.”

Making changes: Already, Elharrar said she is implementing changes. She told JI that she was in the process of establishing a department for new energy, which did not exist previously. She also spent time in Glasgow meeting with counterparts from around the world — and Bill Gates — to explore options for Israel’s move to cleaner energy.

Read the full interview here.

Co-founders of Salignostics

Spit, it turns out, is the scientific glue that binds an Israeli medical startup’s rapid COVID-19 test, which it developed last year, and what is now being billed as the first-ever saliva-based pregnancy tests. The founders of Salignostics, the company behind the SaliCov kit COVID-19 tests and the Salistick pregnancy tests, are graduates of the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Dental Medicine who all dealt with various aspects of saliva during their doctoral studies, Jewish Insider’s Tamara Zieve reports.

Seeking innovation: “In that environment we thought about saliva diagnostics and how to take it to the next generation of IVD [in vitro diagnostics] products,” Guy Krief, co-founder, deputy CEO and director of business development of Salignostics, said. Founded in 2016, the Salignostics team observed that pregnancy tests were the most common tests in pharmacies, and set out to investigate how pregnancy could be detected via saliva instead of the common blood or urine tests.

The saliva enigma: In an initial experiment, the researchers added the β-hCG pregnancy hormone to samples of water, blood and saliva from males (to be sure the samples were free from β-hCG); they found that only the saliva didn’t show up positive on commercial pregnancy tests. “That was an enigma because we just put it in so we knew it had β-hCG, and that was a key experiment which made us understand that saliva possesses a lot of information, but for some reason you can’t see it.”

Developing a toolbox: “That’s when we started all the developments, all the technologies, and today we have a toolbox of technologies which we can combine and optimize for any application,” Krief added. The technology, for example, can be used to detect malaria. The Salignostics team had their toolbox ready to adapt for COVID-19 home tests, and did so within about a year.

Coming soon: The startup’s focus on COVID-19 delayed its progress with the Salistick, but it aims to start commercializing it early next year in Europe and in Israel. Krief also hopes it will have approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by the end of next year. Salignostics says it is in advanced stages of receiving the European Union’s CE mark for Salistick and has completed its initial submission of the test kit to the FDA in the US. The company has successfully completed clinical trials in Israel on more than 300 women, both pregnant and not, and has completed thousands of analytical trials. Salignostics is displaying its product at the Medica 2021 exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany, this week.

Read the full story here.