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Published online 30 December 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1337
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US National Academies suspends visits to Iran
Interrogation of scientist prompts demands for Iranian government to guarantee visitors' safety.
The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has suspended all visits by its scientists to Iran. The move follows the detention in December of one of its top officials, who was in Iran as part of a joint US-Iranian 'science for peace' programme.
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It is probably a good stand that NAS is taking. However I think this particular program was bad planning from the beginning since it was more as an advertising program executed through the higher education ministry of Iran which is part of the government (instead of individual academic centers) and each visit was heavily publicized in Iranian press so I am not surprised that it might have caught the eye of some fanatic gang to cause this incident. On the other hand there have been many visits by American scientist who were invited through the research institutes and universities for scientific purposes and they always go smoothly and pleasantly. I also like to add that as strange as it may sound this is very similar to frequent practices of US government regarding Iranian academics who even though go through a very lengthy clearance procedures before being approved a visa to enter united states still under different names such as border registrations, FBI frequent interviews, national lab restrictions face and experience hours of questioning, poor treatments and discriminatory searches.