US seeks science ties to salve relations with Muslim world

In the coming weeks, three renowned US scientists will fan out across the Muslim world bearing an invitation from the White House to engage in scientific cooperation. In November, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in Morocco that former National Academy of Sciences (NAS) president Bruce Alberts, former National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni, and Nobel laureate and UCLA chemistry professor Ahmed Zewail have agreed to serve as “science envoys” and visit a number of Muslim-majority countries in North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The emissaries will gather input on areas of potential collaboration from government officials and leaders of the nations’ scientific communities.

They are one element of a science and technology (S&T) outreach plan President Obama announced in a June speech at the University of Cairo, when he proposed a “new beginning” in US relations with Muslim-majority nations. Other steps include an increase in the number of environment, science, technology, and health (EST&H) officers stationed at US embassies in those countries and the creation of several “centers of excellence” in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

Also in response to the Cairo speech, the US Overseas Private Investment Corp announced plans in October to establish one or more private equity funds for investing in science, technology, education, and other areas in Muslim nations. OPIC has invited proposals from private equity fund managers to operate the funds, which are to invest in knowledge-based businesses in the countries. Administration officials say the response to OPIC’s solicitation has been overwhelming, and several funds will be created, each with an investment from OPIC of $50 million to $100 million, to be matched by funds from private investors.

Details to come

The Cairo initiative is clearly still in its early stages. No decision has been made on how many of the 57 nations with majority Muslim populations will be invited to participate, nor have significant resources been identified to support the initiative. “Eventually, we would like to see programs of this type extended to the whole world,” says Steve Fetter, assistant director at large at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “These are global challenges, and there is great enthusiasm here in strengthening US partnerships worldwide,” echoes Jason Rao, senior policy analyst at the OSTP. The form, location, and topics to be addressed by the centers of excellence haven’t been defined. “We’re wide open on what it might be,” says Fetter, noting that input gained from the envoys will help to shape the process. But the centers’ focus is likely to be on issues relevant to the regions, such as food, agriculture, and water, he adds. An OSTP spokesman says that centers could consist of brick-and-mortar as well as virtual facilities. As for resources, OSTP staffers say to watch for Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget request, due to be made public next month.

Rao says that Zewail will visit his native Egypt, and possibly Jordan and Lebanon as well, early this month. Alberts will go to Indonesia in the latter part of January. Now editor-in-chief of Science magazine, he spent a good part of his 12 years as NAS president working with national academies in developing nations. He says that he has offered to visit Pakistan in the coming months. “Funding will be a problem, but I’ve been told it’s a presidential priority,” Alberts says. Zerhouni will travel to his native Algeria in February, Rao says, and adds that other details of the Johns Hopkins Medical School professor’s trip haven’t been firmed up. Additional envoys are expected to be named, though Rao and other officials offered no details.

Iran a big exception

The US’s scientific outreach to the Muslim world won’t be touching Iran, which is arguably the Muslim state with the most advanced S&T (see Physics Today, May 2009, page 28 ). Washington and Tehran have had no diplomatic relations for 30 years, and there appears to be no end in sight to the stalemate over the nuclear issue. Improving S&T cooperation with Iran is particularly problematic, says Richard Nephew, the Middle East team chief in the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Non-proliferation, in that “science is at the heart of the issue” of the nuclear stalemate. Trying to disentangle nuclear science and technology from broader cooperation in S&T would be “a public relations nightmare,” he notes.

There is considerable precedent, however, for scientific cooperation among nuclear rivals. Norman Neureiter, a former science adviser to the secretary of state, recalls that in 1972, when the US and Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at each other, the two nations signed an agreement to cooperate in science. At the same time, NASA and its Soviet counterpart began working together to enable the spacecraft of both nations to dock together. “You can imagine how that went over at the [Department of Defense],” Neureiter says. Among the first Chinese visitors to the US following President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to Beijing in 1972 was a delegation of scientists, says Neureiter, who then worked on the staff of the White House science and technology office. “I can still remember meeting them in their Mao suits.”

Glenn Schweitzer, who directs the Eurasian program at the National Academies, says that without exception, high-ranking Iranian officials admire US science and scientists. During two separate visits to Tehran by US scientific delegations, Schweitzer says, he got word that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wished to meet with the visitors. Worried about the message such a photo op would have sent back home, he demurred. Still, he says, visits by American scientists “are improving the image of the US among hundreds of thousands of Iranians.” Indeed, a statue of Nobel laureate physicist Joseph Taylor, who visited Iran two years ago, was recently unveiled at the Pardis Technology Park outside Tehran. Three other US Nobel laureates have traveled to Iran in recent years, and their receptions were uniformly enthusiastic, Schweitzer adds.

But visits to Iran ended abruptly in December 2008, when Schweitzer was detained and interrogated in his Tehran hotel room for hours by men claiming to be government security agents. Letters from presidents of the National Academies demanding guarantees from Iran that such incidents won’t recur have gone unanswered, Schweitzer says. Still, in the past six months, he’s managed to arrange three workshops—in the US, Finland, and France—that were attended by Iranian scientists.

Alex Dehgan, an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow who works on Middle East science issues at the State Department, believes that increasing exchanges between US and Iranian scientists would undermine the case that the regime has been trying to sell to its population—that demands by the US and other Western countries for Tehran to end its nuclear program are really an effort to hold back Iranian progress in S&T.

Science diplomacy

The State Department plans to add 8 to 10 newly trained EST&H officers to embassies in the affected regions, beginning this year. Currently, about 50 EST&H officers are stationed at US embassies worldwide. As their title implies, they are responsible for a broad range of issues, and many handle economic affairs as well. They are career foreign service officers, and most are nonscientists.

Nina Fedoroff, science adviser to the secretary of state, says that the Muslim nation initiative has its roots in a much broader plan to establish a “science diplomacy corps” for embassies to draw on as needed. In the plan, which she has been pushing, scientists from other federal agencies and State Department fellows from universities and industry would be recruited and detailed for up to three months as “embassy science and entrepreneurship fellows” in countries where their expertise is needed. The missing ingredient is funding, she says.

Many Muslim countries are among the 37 nations that have signed formal bilateral S&T agreements with the US. But only two of those pacts—those with nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan—come with dedicated funding. In November, Clinton announced a $45 million US grant to Pakistan’s higher education authority to support the troubled country’s S&T agreement. Proposals submitted to the US–Pakistan program are peer reviewed and ranked separately by both countries, with final selection made by a joint committee.

Fedoroff says she was “deeply impressed” with the quality of the science and the organization of the cofunded projects that were presented at a 2008 conference she hosted at the Islamabad Marriott. That was a few weeks before a truck bomb exploded outside the hotel, killing dozens of guests. With Pakistan’s economy and security deteriorating, she fears that Pakistan won’t be able to find funding for next year. On the positive side, a 2008 agreement between NSF, which can fund only US-based researchers, and the US Agency for International Development, which can support research in eligible developing countries, has opened up a potential new funding stream for the US side of projects supported by bilateral S&T agreements, including Pakistan’s.