Clinton names science envoys

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday announced that three prominent US scientists have been named “science envoys” to arrange scientific collaborations between the US and countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and in south and southeast Asia.

Former National Academy of Sciences president Bruce Alberts , former National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni and Ahmed Zewail , a Nobel laureate professor of chemistry and physics at Caltech, will travel to the regions “to foster scientific and technological collaborations,” Clinton said in a speech delivered in Marrakech, Morocco.

The US also will expand the number of science, technology, environment, and health officers positions at its embassies by an unspecified number. And the government’s Overseas Private Investment Corp is to establish a “global technology and innovation fund” to finance S&T collaborations, she said.

“It was the Islamic world that led the way in science and medicine. It was the Islamic world that paved the way for much of the technology and science that we now take for granted,” Clinton said. “We want to look to your societies and we want to help Muslim majority communities develop the capacity to meet economic, social and ecological challenges through science, technology, and innovation.”

The measures come five months after President Obama promised to increase cooperation with Muslim-majority nations during a June speech at Cairo University .

Two of the envoys are foreign-born—Zewail is Egyptian and Zerhouni is Algerian—while Alberts spent much of his 12 years as NAS president engaging with science academies throughout the world. Zewail is also a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .

Responding to a question he posed during PCAST’s 22 October meeting , State Department science adviser Nina Federoff said the amount of US foreign assistance devoted to science and technology is “minuscule, probably not much more than a couple hundred million dollars, which is pathetic.” While funding is sparse, Federoff said a bright spot is a memorandum of understanding between the US Agency for International Development and the National Science Foundation, which commits the two to co-fund collaborations between US scientists and their counterparts in developing nations.

To complement the science envoys program, Federoff said her office is implementing a new “embassy science and entrepreneur fellows” program where scientists from other federal agencies, as well as university fellows already working at State, are assigned to certain US embassies for periods of up to three months.

In his Cairo speech , Obama promised additional steps to elevate S&T cooperation with Muslim, African and Southeast Asian countries, including “centers of scientific excellence,” and expanded scientific exchanges and scholarships.

In August, Obama further signaled his interest in aligning US S&T with foreign policy, directing his national security and economic advisers to reevaluate US foreign aid policy to take into account such global factors as climate change and natural resource scarcities.

David Kramer

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