AAAS Honors Chemist Zafra Lerman For Efforts To Aid Persecuted Scientists

In its annual observation of the international Human Rights Day, the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program honored Chicago chemistry professor Zafra M. Lerman for her tireless efforts on behalf of persecuted scientists around the world.

As a longtime professor at Columbia College in Chicago, Lerman has established a powerful record as a human rights activist and advocate of science education. She has also been the lead organizer of two conferences, in 2003 and 2005, which brought scientists from the Middle East to the island of Malta to collaborate on the region’s most pressing environmental and health needs. As chair of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights, Lerman has been a global leader in campaigns on behalf of persecuted scientists.

She played a major role in an international scientific movement to protect Alexander Nikitin, a Russian scientist charged in 1996 with high treason and divulging state secrets. Nikitin was targeted for documenting environmental dangers posed by the abandoned Russian Northern Fleet nuclear submarines in the Kola Peninsula. The ACS subcommittee also has worked in recent years on behalf of scientists in Russia, Cuba, China, Belarus, Iran, Burma, Libya and Vietnam, among others, often in close collaboration with AAAS and other groups.

“Dr. Lerman has been the subcommittee’s linchpin,” said Audrey Chapman, head of the AAAS Science and Human Rights program. “She has worked to extend its parameters from chemists to include physicists and other scientists. And she has worked on countless cases for scientists whose human rights have been trampled.”

Lerman was born in Israel in 1937. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology; she earned her Ph.D in chemistry from Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. After doing research at Cornell and Northwestern universities in the United States and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, she joined Columbia College in Chicago in 1977.

Today she is distinguished professor of science and public policy and head of the Institute for Science Education and Science Communication at Columbia. She is widely recognized as an innovator in science education and for encouraging students with disabilities to enter the sciences.

For the event honoring Lerman, AAAS brought together a panel of experts to discuss the workings and impact of the Malta conferences. Lerman brought together Middle Eastern scientists from countries such as Israel, Iran, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, to discuss some of the key issues facing the region — the environment, health, education and economic development. The goal of the conferences was to encourage communication and collaboration among the scientific communities of Middle Eastern countries, and ultimately, among their governments

As water is a vital and scarce commodity in the Middle East, Lerman said, and governments are interested in finding a solution to this important issue, getting scientists from different countries to collaborate on research on water purification might be part of the solution.

“Governments are open to listening to their scientists and, therefore, strong collaborations between scientists on issues of concern to the governments in the past have led to communication between governments and normalizations,” said Lerman.

She presented slides of conference participants from rivaling nations happily intermingling on Malta. She said the two conferences were successes in developing relationships across borders, pointing out that participants have continued to interact after returning home and that joint research is currently being undertaken.

After the first Malta conference in 2003, Lerman said scientists from Israel and the Palestinian Authority met to discuss and plan scientific collaborations. For example, two of the conferees have submitted a joint proposal to an international granting agency to perform research on water quality.

“For Malta-1, we had scientists who were hesitant to participate, especially scientists from countries where the official policy is that they are not allowed to sit under the same roof as Israelis,” Lerman explained. She said that these scientists explained their hesitations after they were invited and declined the invitations.

“The ones who did participate,” Lerman said, “reported after the conference that they communicated to their respective governments their participation in this prestigious conference, and did not get into any trouble.”

Therefore, in Malta-2, held in November 2005, there were many more participants, and a few were from countries from which scientists had hesitated to come to Malta-1. Lerman said she’s already getting e-mails from scientists who had heard about the first two conferences and are eager to get an invitation to the third one.

Most panelists at the AAAS Human Rights Day Celebration were participants in the Malta conferences. Ahmed Mohamed, a visiting professor of chemistry at the Texas A&M University and faculty member at Zagazig University in Egypt was on the conference organizing committee and spoke about the number of scientific papers published in various countries in the region and how that number has risen significantly in the past couple of years.

Mohamed was followed by Charles Kolb, president and CEO of Aerodyne Research Inc., who coordinated environmental chemistry sessions at both Malta conferences. At the Human Rights Day event, Kolb presented statistics on the severe air and water quality problems in the Middle East. Kolb said that regional collaboration is crucial in alleviating some of these problems. The Malta conferences may have catalyzed such collaboration, he said, through the establishment of a Middle East Air and Water Quality Forum, which includes representatives from each of the participating countries. The Forum will work to establish a database, communicate among its representatives, and organize regional meetings in order to accomplish the recommendations made in the Malta-2 conference.

Arthur Ellis, Director of the Division of Chemistry of the National Science Foundation (NSF), spoke about NSF-funded chemistry initiatives in the Middle East. Ellis said the first Malta conference, which was partially supported by the Division of Chemistry through an award to the American Chemical Society, is emblematic of the kind of bold, out-of-the-box projects that the division seeks to encourage. As one outcome of the award and conference, a project to hold a trio of workshops in the Middle East on cutting-edge science has recently been co-funded with the U.S. Department of State through the Division's Discovery Corps Fellowship Program.

Finally, E. Ann Nalley, president-elect of the American Chemical Society, praised Lerman for her determination and spoke a little bit about what she called “the human side of Malta-1 and 2.” She shared various personal observations, including an anecdote about a scientist who told her his whole life had changed as a result of Malta-1. In his country, Nalley said, the scientist worked in an atmosphere where he had no one to turn to for help and a lack of equipment necessary to do his work. In response to his presentation before participants of Malta-2, the scientist received from his Middle Eastern colleagues not only the much-needed feedback he was lacking, but also offers of equipment and mentorship.

“I’ve already seen tremendous changes taking place,” said Nalley. “The building of confidence, the camaraderie, the willingness to try to find a way to work together.”

Lerman is already planning the third conference in this series, possibly to take place in Cyprus, Turkey, Qatar or Malta late in 2007, and is open to suggestions for improvement.

At the conclusion of the Human Rights Day event, Lerman described her plans for the third conference. For instance, she would like to see younger scientists involved, more of a balance between male and female scientist attendees, more oral presentations from Middle Eastern scientists and more countries represented. She would especially like to see the participation of Iraq, a representative of which was unable to make it to the first two conferences.

International Human Rights Day is the anniversary of the 10 December 1948 adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In observance of this day each year, the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program honors a U.S.-based scientist, or organization, who has made significant contributions to advancing human rights within the scientific community.

The AAAS Science and Human Rights Program was established in 1977 to give scientists a way to help their colleagues around the world whose human rights are threatened or violated. Mobilizing effective assistance to protect the human rights of scientists around the world remains central to its mission, as well as making the tools and knowledge of science available to benefit the field of human rights.

Lonnie Shekhtman

21 December 2005