Researchers Look West to Model New Academy

摘要

London—Capping a month of new science initiatives in Iraq, a dozen top Iraqi-born researchers convened here at the U.K.'s Royal Society last week to establish the Iraqi National Academy of Science (INAS). The organization, in the style of Western academies, is intended to be an independent source of funding for Iraqi scientists and of advice to the government. But with autonomy comes poverty: Its leaders say they will have to go cup in hand to sister academies and research institutions. INAS seeks to supplant what was, by many accounts, a vile predecessor. The original academy, a Soviet-style network of institutes established in 1947, lost all integrity during the reign of Saddam Hussein, says chemist Ghazi Derwish, science chief of a standing committee that will run INAS until an assembly approves a charter and elects officers in 2004. "The linkage with the presidential palace became so strong as to transform the academy into merely a mouthpiece of the regime," he asserts.