Ephraim Lansky is a University of Pennsylvania trained integrative medical doctor concentrating in complementary cancer care. He is a licensed practitioner of medical hypnosis in Israel. He teaches Kokikai Aikido one day a week, in which he holds a second degree black belt. His work with pomegranate fruits and their value-added healthcare products yielded several patents, a PhD in pharmacognosy from Leiden University in The Netherlands, and an MBA from Bradford University in England. He is the co-author with Helena Paavilainen and Shifra Lansky of Caper: The Genus Capparis, and with Helena Paavilainen of Figs: The Genus Ficus, both books by CRC Press. He is also co-author with Robert A. Newman, formerly of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, of Pomegranate: The Most Medicinal Fruit (Basic Books). Shifra Lansky holds a BSc in chemistry from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she is presently pursuing her graduate studies. Her focus is on the biochemical and structural characterization of bacterial proteins that may be used for the production of bio-fuel. Shifra also enjoys playing the violin, reading, and skiing in her spare time. Helena Paavilainen is a researcher at the Hadassah Medical School, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her main research interests are ethnomedicine, historical ethnopharmacology, and the history of pharmacology, especially the Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin traditions. She wrote her PhD thesis (published as "Medieval Pharmacotherapy: Continuity and Change; Case Studies from Ibn Sina and Some of His Late Medieval Commentators," Leiden: Brill, 2009) on the development of medical drug therapy in medieval times and on the potential validity of medieval herbal treatments. She also coauthored with Dr. Lansky the monograph Figs: The Genus Ficus (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2010), and with Dr. Lansky and Shifra Lansky the sequel Caper: The Genus Capparis in 2014. She currently works as a freelance consultant bioprospecting ancient and medieval herbal texts for practical applications in medicine, functional nutrition, and agriculture.
