The list of Arab Nobel laureates includes fourteen names: six in literature and peace, and eight in the sciences. Six of them hold foreign nationalities but are of Arab descent, while only two were raised in the Arab world and later moved to America at different ages.
Hot Topics
Trump rejected a Saudi request to launch US strikes against the Houthis
First successful robot-assisted double liver and kidney transplant in the United States
A prominent historian In Israel a large number of lions and lionesses are led by donkeys
The list includes Naguib Mahfouz in literature, who received it in 1988, and in peace it was carried by Arabs including Anwar Sadat, Yasser Arafat, Mohamed ElBaradei, Tawakkol Karman, and Nadia Murad.
The circle of Arab presence expands when we add to it scientists and figures of Arab origin, including, for example, Serge Haroche, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012, who was born in Casablanca, Morocco, Mongi Baoundi, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023, who is of Tunisian origin, and Peter Medawar, the British of Lebanese origin, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1960.
But the most prominent scientific presence on that list was that of the Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail, and the Jordanian Omar Yaghi, as their journey began in the Arab world, and then the Nobel achievement was made in America.
With these two cases in particular, the Arab share of the Nobel Prize is transformed from a mere list that we try to expand by searching for names of Arab origin, into a question about the geography of knowledge production, which is: Can the Arab world create a world? And the answer, of course, based on these two stories, is: Yes.
But can he provide him with the environment that allows him to produce research worthy of a Nobel Prize? This is where the story begins, with all its painful details.
Ahmed Zewail's scientific journey embodies the stark contradiction of an environment that nurtured a brilliant mind but failed to preserve it. At Alexandria University, Zewail studied chemistry, then was appointed as a teaching assistant after graduation. He began his master's research under the supervision of Egyptian professors, and his work resulted in several scientific publications.
Then came the step that changed the course of his life, which was moving to the United States, where he obtained a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, then worked at the University of California, Berkeley, and then in 1976 he moved to the California Institute of Technology , where he completed the research in hyperfast chemistry that led to the Nobel Prize.
Tags:
science