Marking the historic milestone of its 70th anniversary, the Hadassah Medical Center’s Department of Neurology hosted an international symposium for world leaders in the field of neurology. Participants came from Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Poland, Scotland, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States to share perspectives and knowledge about neurological diagnosis, treatment, and research.
Hadassah United Kingdom reports that among the attendees were three distinguished professors from the UK—Prof. G.E. Kennedy of Glasgow Univeristy, Prof. John Newsom-Davis from Oxford Unviersity, and Professor Alastair D.S. Compston from Cambridge University. Their attendance illustrated their intention, echoed by a large majority of UK medical researchers and practitioners, to reject the proposed boycott of Israeli academicians. Prof. Peter Kennedy, a Fellow of the Royal Society, has declared the boycott to be “unethical, unfair, inappropriate, and just plain wrong.”
During the symposium, Prof. Oded Abramsky, who served as head of the Department of Neurology for 17 years, from 1988-2005, was honored. He was one of the first scientists to establish the field of neuroimmunology and to demonstrate immune pathogenesis in various neurological diseases.
Hadassah’s Department of Neurology, the first of its kind in the region, was established in 1937 by Prof. Lipman Halpern, who emigrated from Berlin, Germany to Jerusalem. It is currently headed by Prof. Tamir Ben-Hur, and its physicians and scientists are involved in various research studies, including autoimmune diseases of the nerve system; development of medications for Multiple Sclerosis; Prion diseases; degenerative diseases of the brain; vascular diseases of the brain; and stem cell transplantation as a treatment for brain disease.
