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Friday May 27, 2005

Scientific magic: Israel and Iran team up in lab

by gil sedan
jta

petra, jordan | Here’s some good news from the Middle East: Iran and Israel, bitter enemies, need no “open sesame” magic to be able to cooperate on an advanced scientific project.

In Alaan, a town just north of Amman — and at a comfortable remove from the spotlight thrown by political conflicts — representatives of the two countries are involved in developing SESAME, an acronym for Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East.

It’s a rare and possibly unique example of scientific cooperation between Israel, Iran and other countries with which Israel has no ties, such as Pakistan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Other members are Jordan, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Turkey. Libya is expected to join soon as an observer.

“The political importance of the project cannot be underestimated,” said Professor Khaled Toukan, Jordan’s minister of education and the project’s acting director.

SESAME, the Middle East’s first major international research center, is a synchrotron accelerator. It uses magnets to create a circular path for electrons traveling at nearly the speed of light, producing a beam of bright ultraviolet and X-ray light, about the diameter of a human hair, that is directed down beam lines to end stations.

“These beam lines are so much stronger than the known X-rays that they open up new options for scientific research,” said Professor Moshe Deutsch, chairman of Israel’s national council for synchrotron radiation and one of two Israeli participants in SESAME.

SESAME is expected to contribute to a wide range of scientific research, including structural molecular biology, molecular environmental science, X-ray imaging, archeological microanalysis, materials characterization and clinical medical applications.

Synchrotron radiation is widely used in materials science and biomedical applications, including lithography for computer chips, absorption and scattering measurements and high-pressure applications to create artificial diamonds and other substances.

An international synchrotron-light source in the Middle East was first proposed in 1997, when peace seemed to be on the way. European and Middle Eastern scientists worked together, and with the contribution of an old German synchrotron, SESAME got underway.

The annual budget is anticipated to be between $4 million and $8 million.

Why did Iran chose to participate in the project along with Israel?

“Iran used to be considered a villain in the world scientific community,” Deutsch said. “For Iran, this is a way of getting out of isolation, but the scientific benefits of the project per se are a good enough reason.”

Deutsch’s comments were affirmed by his Iranian colleague, Reza Mansouri, vice minister for research at Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology.

Contacted via e-mail, Mansouri said that “international and regional scientific collaboration is one of the recommendations of science policy in Iran. It is then too natural to collaborate in this project.”

Asked if Iran’s participation together with Israel had any political significance, Mansouri replied with a brief but decisive “No!”

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