Science not yet without borders

The May 2008 issue of Physics Today contains an Opinion piece ( page 51 ) written by Barry Sanders and titled “Science Without Borders.” Sanders’s belief that science should transcend politics led him to help organize the International Iran Conference on Quantum Information, which was held in 2007 in the free zone of Kish Island, Iran.

Sanders raises an important issue. It is deeply unfortunate that political intrusion into scientific conferences, such as American punitive measures against Cuban scholars, is all too common. It is also deeply unfortunate that the conference put together by Sanders perpetuated precisely the same intrusion: Israeli citizens were barred from attending.

What would have happened had Sanders’s group threatened to cancel the conference over the barring of Israeli scientists? That action seems not too much to ask of a conference whose raison d’être is “bringing together the best science worldwide, independent of politics,” thereby allowing formation of “a bond between humans from all societies.” Would the Iranian government have found a way to make an exception to its exclusionary policy? We’ll never know, but a rare opportunity for Israeli and Iranian intellectuals to come together and see each other’s humanity may have been missed.

I do not advocate a boycott of Iranian scientists, and I have no quarrel if Sanders wishes to hold a conference in Iran. But that conference has done nothing to reduce political intrusion into scientific discourse. It simply provided another venue where a particular nation’s scholars, Israelis in this case, were excluded. The self-congratulatory tone of the piece, and especially its title, hardly seems merited.