Dire need for a Middle Eastern science spring.

The outcome of the uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa may be uncertain, but what is clear is that a political transformation has taken place. People in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia will not allow a return to totalitarian governance. Not only can they demonstrate and bring down governments — they will no longer tolerate a degraded economic and educational status. Through social media and the Internet, they ‘see’ the world and ponder why they have not achieved what their counterparts in South Korea or China have. Pundits may argue that the outcome of these uprisings should be democracy, but equally important are the scientific and cultural transformations that are essential for development and diplomacy to flourish. Let us recall that in the evolution of Western civilization, the Enlightenment came ahead of modern democracy, and both before the current governance structure and social order. I have been concerned with these issues in the Middle East for decades — in official and non-official capacities — and their relevance to a ‘science for the have-nots’ vision, which addresses the mission of aid programmes and diffusion of science in developing countries1. In November 2009 I was asked to be the first US science envoy to the Middle East and soon after I began the inaugural mission, visiting Egypt (the most populous country in the Arab world at 85 million with a gross domestic product (GDP) of US$6,500 per capita), Turkey (80 million people of Middle Eastern, but non-Arab, descent and a GDP of US$15,000 per capita) and the Gulf state of Qatar (2 million people with nearly 0.3 million Qataris and a GDP of US$100,000 per capita). Figure 1a,b shows the total population, literate population and GDP of these countries, as well as those of Iran (whose population is similar to Egypt) and South Korea (an Eastern Asian country with a GDP remarkably higher than that of Egypt, and which has shown a significant scientific development in the past few decades). The meetings were broad-ranging and included visits with government officials (heads of state, prime ministers, ministers and some members of parliament), members of the education sector (teachers, students and university professors), institutions of higher education and research (private and state universities), members of the private sector (economists, industrialists, writers and publishers) and some media representatives. These visits exposed the plight of education and science in the region, which lags behind international standards (the consequences are clearly spelled out in the 2003 Arab Human Development Report sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme2). The data are telling: whereas the expenditure in research and development (R&D) of South Korea and Israel reaches 4% of the GDP and both countries spend 5% of their similar GDP (US$30,000 per capita) in education, Egypt’s R&D expenditure is 0.4% at a GDP of US$6,500 per capita (Fig. 1b,c). The current situation is in sharp contrast to the system of schools and universities that existed even in the 1960s, when I benefitted personally from an excellent education in Egypt. In the Middle East, Israel leads today in scientific impact, and a major part of its GDP is science-driven. In general, publication and citation indicators show some encouraging trends for the region over the past decade (Fig. 2). However, the impact of scientific research in the Arabian, Persian and Turkish