London

Royal Society officials meet with Hussain Al-Shahristani (right) to discuss next steps for Iraqi science. Credit: ROYAL SOC.

A dozen Iraqi scientists and engineers met with officials of the Royal Society in London last week and agreed to set up an Iraqi academy of sciences. They said that the academy would help to develop a research strategy for the country.

Although most of the Iraqi participants work in Iraq, the meeting was held in London for security reasons, organizers said. Hussain Al-Shahristani, an exiled chemical engineer who initiated the meeting, says that the organization will be open to established scientists and engineers, and will be independent of the government. He is hoping to attract “a few hundred thousand pounds” from Western sources to set up the body, whose first full meeting is planned for next November in Baghdad.

A former senior adviser to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, Al-Shahristani says that he was imprisoned and tortured during Saddam Hussein's regime for refusing to work on an atomic-weapons programme. He escaped from Iraq in 1991, when Baghdad was bombed during the first Gulf War, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Surrey, UK.

Al-Shahristani suggests that establishing environmental studies of biological, chemical and radiological pollution should be a priority for the academy. In particular, he would like to find out whether the pollution, some of which was caused by weapons-testing programmes, is linked to an increase in cancer rates that has been reported in the country.

Other exiled participants said that they were unsure if they would ever return to Iraq. Farhan Bakir, former personal physician to Saddam Hussein, left in 1981 after being forced into early retirement. Bakir says that he feared for his safety.

“People were being killed and arrested,” he recalls. “I was insecure, but so was everyone in Iraq.” Bakir, currently at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California, says that he would like to go back, but will wait until things are more settled. “I'm over 70,” he jokes. “I'll take an advisory position at this age.”

The Iraqi Academy of Sciences that operated under Saddam had few international contacts, and has now ceased to function. Critics say that it was directly controlled by officials close to Saddam. Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, an Iraqi microbiologist who was reportedly a senior figure in the country's biological-weapons programme and is now in US custody, ran the academy from the mid-1990s.

But nuclear, chemical and biological weapons pose a dilemma for the new academy. Scientists at the London meeting said that those involved in developing weapons of mass destruction would not be allowed to join. But Al-Shahristani acknowledges that some scientists had little choice about the area they worked in. “People know who was forced into weapons work,” he says. “We'll look at it on a case-by-case basis.”