ABDUS SALAM has never forgotten that he had to leave his native Pakistan in order to pursue his life’s work in theoretical physics. He firmly believes that talented scientists from developing nations should be encouraged to carry out their research in their home countries. For Salam, a strong base in fundamental science and high technology is the key to national advancement.
From such uncompromising convictions came a germ of an idea that is growing into a scientific programme of worldwide proportions. The International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste in northern Italy, which Salam founded a quarter of a century ago to help Third World physicists, has become a bold model for other scientific disciplines. Today, Salam envisages setting up centres of excellence all over the developing world in research areas ranging from disaster prediction to biotechnology.
Last year, the ICTP celebrated its 25th anniversary with an international meeting where 150 physicists, including several Nobel prizewinners, were invited to discuss the latest physical theories in fields from astronomy to condensed matter.
Advertisement
The ICTP, perched on the edge of the Adriatic, close to the Yugoslav border, provides an ideal intellectual, cultural and geographical focal point, where North meets South, and East meets West. For more than two decades, Salam has persuaded the world’s greatest intellects to come to Trieste to teach and guide young physicists and mathematicians from the developing South. But more important is that the ICTP functions as a sort of lonely scientists’ club for Brazilians, Nigerians, Sri Lankans, or whoever feels the isolation resulting from lack of resources in their own country.
Salam remembers those feelings very well. Born in Jhang in Pakistan in 1926, he went to college in Lahore at 16 where he obtained his first degree in mathematics. At the age of 20, Salam left for Cambridge to read mathematics and physics. Like other students from the Indian subcontinent he had to rely on scholarships. When he started research, first at the Cavendish Laboratory and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, his creative brilliance as a theorist was soon noticed by the leading physicists of the day.
Rather than stay among such illustrious company, Salam preferred to return to Pakistan to teach at the University of Lahore. But things did not work out. Salam recalls: ‘To my dismay, I learnt that I was the only practising theoretical physicist in the entire nation. No one cared whether I did any research. Worse, I was expected to look after the college soccer team as my major duty besides teaching undergraduates.’
Feeling very much on his own, Salam remembers how he was overjoyed when Wolfgang Pauli, who was touring India in 1952, invited him to the Tata Institute in Bombay for Christmas. On returning to Lahore, Salam recalls that he was penalised for leaving Pakistan without permission. It was the last straw; Salam returned to Cambridge in 1954.
Salam went on to work with other theoretical physicists on electroweak theory, which eventually led to his winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow. But he remained conscious that he was part of a South-North brain drain. The US, for example, entices more than half of Third World postgraduates who go to American universities to stay on in the country, even though these students receive their general education at the expense of their economically weaker home country.
So besides searching for a unifying theory of matter and forces, Salam had another ambition – to set up a centre for Third World scientists. He wanted to create an exciting and intellectually stimulating environment where students and researchers from the Third World could come and work for periods from a few weeks to several months, then return home to continue research there. ‘If someone had offered me this, I would have accepted it,’ says Salam.
By 1960, at the age of 34, Salam was already a professor at Imperial College in London. He was an influential scientist. People listened when Salam broached the idea of an international centre for theoretical physics during a conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). At first, the developed countries and the Eastern bloc were not keen on the idea. According to Salam, the Australian delegate went so far as to say: ‘Theoretical physics is the Rolls-Royce of science, what the developing countries need is donkey carts.’
With strong support from Third World countries, however, the board of the IAEA eventually voted a sum of $55,000 (then about Pounds sterling 20,000) for one year to establish the ICTP. Several countries put in bids to house the centre, but Italy made Salam an offer he could not refuse – $300,000 plus an attractive building in Trieste. The centre was formally inaugurated in 1964.
By 1969, the ICTP had established itself in all the areas of physics – particle physics, nuclear physics, plasma physics and condensed matter physics – that the IAEA supported. In 1970, UNESCO joined as an equal partner in the financing of the centre. This widened the scope of the centre to cover atmospheric physics, oceanography and atomic physics.
The centre has grown rapidly in size as well, from fewer than 200 scientific visitors in 1964 to more than 4000 today. Between 35 and 40 courses are held each year, together with conferences and workshops. Postdoctoral fellows from the Third World come for one or two years. Not only does the centre cater for theorists, but experimental physicists are also invited through the centre to work in laboratories all over Italy. The ICTP has also tried to improve the quality of science within developing countries themselves by sending out surplus books from scientific publishing companies and equipment from large laboratories, such as the European Centre for Nuclear Research, CERN, and by coordinating scientific effort by encouraging the pooling of resources.
All these activities cost money. And although agencies, such as the Swedish International Development Agency, the Ford Foundation and OPEC have given grants, by far the bulk of the money comes from the Italian government. This year, it provides more than 90 per cent of the $19 million received by ICTP.
Why has the Italian government been so supportive? One reason is that Italians admire scientists and, secondly, physicists – the Godfathers of Italian science – are a powerful force to be reckoned with when it comes to apportioning funds. Paolo Budnich, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Trieste, who was deputy director of the ICTP until he retired in 1978, has played an important role in the expansion of the centre. Antonino Zichichi, who was a director at CERN, is another keen supporter.
Even Salam has learnt to speak the kind of language that Italians understand. ‘In 1979, after I won the Nobel prize, I told the Italian government I was going to leave unless they increased their contribution to four or five times as much. $3.5 million was what I wanted. They offered us $3 million.’
Equally telling is the fact that the Italian Prime Minister, Guilio Andreotti, when he was Minister for Foreign Affairs, saw funding research in science and technology as an important part of overseas aid. Italian civil servants were quick to point out that what is good for the Third World could also be good for Italy; initiatives channelled through the ICTP would also stimulate locally produced science and technology.
Building on the success of the ICTP, Salam is now anxious to carry through his vision of high technology for all, and has suggested creating a new centre for the Third World with three components. One will be a centre for chemistry to research into industrially important areas, such as catalysis, polymers and drugs; the second centre will be for high tech nology and new materials, including super conductors; the third and perhaps most interesting centre will be devoted to earth and environmental sciences, particularly earthquake prediction and climate.
The UN Industrial Development Organisation and the Third World Academy of Sciences – yet another scientific body established four years ago by Salam – are preparing a feasibility report. The Italian government has given $2.5 million with the possibility of another $10 million over the next two years.
So far, there has been little financial support from outside Italy. The IAEA currently provides $1.2 million a year for Salam’s centre, and plans to keep funding at the same level. The agency has been set a target of zero growth, so is, according to a spokesman, ‘unlikely to make an exception for new projects’. UNESCO now contributes $400 000 a year, which, says Siegbert Raither, UNESCO’s programme specialist for physics, ‘is a huge amount for us’. Raither says he is not clear how useful a materials science centre, for example, would be but points out that the director general of UNESCO, Federico Mayor, is ‘quite enthusiastic’ about Salam’s proposals. ‘Salam wants a million dollars a year, which would be a hefty sum for us but not impossible,’ says Raither.
Nevertheless, financial dependence on one nation naturally worries Salam. The Italian connection has meant that the future of his activities in Trieste is inextricably entwined in the knotty tangle of Italian politics and the rigid bureaucratic infrastructure of Italian science. Salam quotes a recent example of connivance, Italian style, when the Italian government gave the ICTP extra money to pass on to the University of Rome, so that Rome could be seen to be obtaining ‘foreign’ support.
Salam is also worried that the ICTP and its offspring will become too European. He does not share the enthusiasm of some scientists at Trieste for building up links with Eastern European countries, which may or may not be classed as developing nations, depending on your point of view. Salam wants to see the ICTP as the nucleus of a more international network firmly based in the Third World.
Organisations such as UNESCO could not provide the millions of dollars needed for such an ambitious project. And, as the organisation’s spokesman hinted, such a network could compete with UNESCO’s own network of scientific centres. For this reason, Salam has been to see Robert Macnamara, former president of the World Bank, to try to obtain support for 20 new centres to be established in developing countries around the world. Although Macnamara is enthusiastic, $50 million a year is the most Salam says he could expect to receive.
Salam realises that such a scheme has little chance of becoming a reality unless there is a firm commitment on behalf of political leaders of developing countries: ‘The project needs a lot of money.’ He suggests that each country should put aside 1 per cent of its GNP for science and technology. Some countries, such as Jamaica and Venezuela, are enthusiastic, but Salam recognises that convincing many others with perhaps pressing political problems will be a long hard struggle. ‘But I go through life like a sleepwalker. I never worry whether something is going to be a success or not.’
* * *
The benefits of becoming a centre of science
THE SUCCESS of the ICTP has had several spin-offs for Trieste. One of those was the Italian government’s offer to support a proposal in 1982 by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation to create a centre of excellence for research in genetic engineering and biotechnology.
Georgio Cicogna, a career diplomat who is the government’s representative to the ICTP, admits that ‘in the field of genetic engineering we were behind’. The International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), now divided between Trieste’s science park and New Delhi, is an integral part of the Italian genetic research programme, as well as being seen to be an investment in the Third World.
The Italian half of the operation, headed by Arturo Falaschi from the Genetic and Evolutionary Biochemistry Institute in Pavia, has been going for two-and-a-half years and has set itself some ambitious projects divided into three topics: DNA replication and protein chemistry; infections caused by the human papilloma virus; and studying how microbes and enzymes break down woody materials (lignocellulose). Many Third World countries find themselves with mountains of sawdust, straw and nutshells as by-products of forestry and agriculture.
Falaschi now has 40 people working at the ICGEB including ‘junior’ scientists from many Third World countries. He admits that it is difficult to attract top researchers from developed nations to lead research groups ‘because of the lack of equipment’. Nevertheless, Falaschi is encouraged by the interest that scientists from Eastern Europe have shown in the ICGEB. Highly trained Hungarians and Yugoslavs are already working there.
For further financial resources, Falaschi is turning to Italian pharmaceuticals companies, such as Farmitalia in Pavia and Sclavo in Siena, with the idea of working on joint enterprises. Research will also benefit from the Italian Synchrotron Radiation Facility, which is also being built in the science park.
Cicogna sees these efforts to link the future of Trieste with science and technology as part of an initiative to promote Trieste as a ‘town of science’. A one-time trading hub of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trieste has, as a result of two world wars and subsequent changing borders, declined in importance, becoming economically depressed in latter years. This new role for Trieste will be reinforced when the latest grand scheme comes to fruition – that is to set up an international centre for science and technology.