Washington

The rebuilding of Iraq's scientific infrastructure stepped up a gear last week with the establishment of a research ministry.

Iraq's chief civilian administrator, US diplomat Paul Bremer, announced on 1 September that the US-led coalition occupying Iraq had abolished the Ministry of Atomic Energy and set up a Ministry of Science and Technology in its place. The new ministry features six directorates dealing with energy, the environment, information technology, agriculture, materials science and industrial development. It will be led by Rashad Omar Mandan, a British-trained civil engineer who served at the Iraqi oil ministry until he fled the country in 1999.

Mandan was sworn in as minister of science and technology on 2 September along with Iraq's first minister of higher education, Ziad Abderrazzak Mohammad Aswad, a US-trained engineer who previously headed the oil-engineering department at Baghdad University.

The US government has also named John Agresto, former president of St John's College in Sante Fe, New Mexico, as the senior American official who will oversee Iraq's university system. “From what I gather, the situation is very bad — but not desperate,” Agresto says. He adds that his priorities will be to rebuild the infrastructure of the colleges and hire faculty members who were dismissed or exiled under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

Agresto, a political scientist, was deputy head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Ronald Reagan. During his tenure at St John's College, he got to know Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, whose wife sat on the college's board of trustees.