“Should you wake up one day to find your wife or child or parent in the hands of the secret police in a country that routinely violates the rule of law, you will likely choose quiet probing over publicity. You have no recourse to law or courts. You fear publicity may make things worse. You believe, almost always wrongly, that if you work quietly, use the contacts you have and wait reasonably, the nightmare will be over.”

In this plea in the Los Angeles Times, Shaul Bakhash, a specialist in Middle Eastern history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, eloquently captures the predicament of prisoners and their families caught up in political conflicts. Bakhash's wife Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, is one of three US–Iranian researchers jailed in Iran on charges of plotting a 'velvet revolution'.

Scientists should support such efforts in every way they can, to ensure that Iran's rulers know the world is watching.

Bakhash has broken his silence, and is backing protests by academic and human-rights organizations as the best hope for justice for the jailed researchers (see page 890). Scientists should support such efforts in every way they can, to ensure that Iran's rulers know the world is watching.

Keeping the cases in the spotlight is also helpful in pressing diplomats to make resolution of the cases a priority. The importance of this has been demonstrated in the case of six health workers condemned to death in Libya. Their appeal will be judged today by Libya's Supreme Court — one step in a delicate endgame, which observers hope will lead to their prompt release.

In the current climate of mutual suspicion between the United States and Iran, simply protesting innocence is not enough. Academics should also demand that Iran respect its commitments to human-rights treaties by making public its evidence against the three, as it has so far failed to do, and allowing them access to lawyers.

Iranian academics are also suffering discrimination abroad as a result of Iran's stand-off with the international community and in particular with the United States. Although the difficulties of getting visas for entry to the United States have eased, Iranians tell of new problems in Canada and Australia, and complain of being shunned in international collaborations as being part of a 'rogue state'.

The arrests have led to calls for a deepening of Iran's academic isolation (to be fair, these calls are based more on legitimate concerns about safety of travel than on a desire to boycott Iran). This approach has also reared its head in Britain, where the annual meeting of the University and College Union voted on 30 May to ask its branches to consider a proposal to boycott Israeli academic institutions. They should firmly reject this proposal (see Nature 417, 1; 2002).

Where colleagues suffer as a result of political tensions, researchers everywhere should be engaging more, not less, in constructive reform and cooperation — through increased support, for example, of collaborative projects in the regions concerned.