Commentary pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Human Rights, Education, and Peace: A Personal Odyssey Zafra J. Margolin Lerman* MIMSAD, Inc., Evanston, Illinois 60201, United States ABSTRACT: George Pimentel was a role model for me since I first met him. He inspired me to concentrate on public understanding of science, especially for students who will become our future communicators. Parallel to developing methods of teaching chemistry to nonscience majors, I worked on human rights issues for scientists around the world whose freedom was taken away from them for standing up for what they believed was the right thing to do. Scientists were released from prison, executions were averted, and freedom to travel was granted. Since September 11, 2001, using science as a bridge to peace in the Middle East became an important activity for me. Five conferences titled Frontiers of Chemical Sciences: Research and Education in the Middle East were organized. Scientists from 15 Middle East countries gathered with six Nobel laureates to work together on chemical education and on air and water quality. Chemical education united them all, and collaboration and cooperation were achieved. KEYWORDS: General Public, Public Understanding/Outreach FEATURE: Award Address
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This is a time for action. We are the individuals who can and must lead this action campaign. It is a responsibility we cannot sidestep. Please join in. Help us get back on the right road. He said it in 1989. We are still saying it. The time is past due to act on George’s vision. When we get together, we must not discuss the same problems again and again without resolution. A tenet of my life is that equal access to science education is a basic human right that belongs to all. So to bring science education to the underprivilegedto the inner city, to the developing countriesis a human rights issue. By not doing it we rob these children of the opportunity to develop their full potential. Science education is part of human rights.
uman rights, education, and peace must be the foundation for doing science everywhere in the world. This Pimentel Award address connects these necessary conditions as seen through the lens of my own experience and life’s work.1 Over the past 25 years, the Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights, which was part of the International Activities Committee of the American Chemical Society (ACS), worked tirelessly on behalf of these principles. The subcommittee accomplished much, and for that we have a lot to celebrate. But we always must remember that not everyone can celebrate with us. There are people who do not have the freedom to join in the celebrations, because they stood up for causes that all of us believe in, and are in prison because of it. Therefore, the work of this Subcommitteehelping to bring about the release of prisoners of conscience, working to spare those scheduled for execution, and helping others immigrate to countries that would give them the freedom to practice chemistryis a very important part of what this Subcommittee has done and must continue to do. Sadly, in 2010, after 25 years of hard work and success, the Subcommittee was dissolved.2 George Pimentel shared my interest in trying to make the world a better place for human kind. I only knew him for a few years, but they were quite intense and we had a very strong friendship. We met at an ICCE (International Conference on Chemical Education) meeting in Japan in 1985, where we had some time to talk and realized our shared goal to improve public appreciation of science. When George accepted the Priestley Medal, he stated:3 I became acutely aware of the mismatch between the rich potentialities of chemistry today and the tarnished public image carried by chemicals and the chemical industry. In view of such potentialities and promise, one might expect that chemistry would be entering a golden era of benefit to human society. However, we find public attitudes pointing us down a road orthogonal to this optimistic prospectone that might deny us this golden era. He went on to call upon scientists to begin a campaign of public education:3 © XXXX American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
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HUMAN RIGHTS Yuri Tarnopolsky was the first person the ACS Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights managed to release from prison through a campaign of letter writing to the Soviet authorities.4 He was able to leave the Soviet Union after three years of hard labor in Siberia. He arrived in the U.S. in 1987, and his first address was at the ACS meeting in New Orleans that year. Yuri wrote me a letter in which he made the following statement, which I think all of us should consider:5 I often wondered what could make a person living in freedom, safety, and comfort to fight for someone deprived of all that and languishing on the other side of the globe.... I realized that both the faraway victim and his American guardian angel had something in common. They had the same ability to go against the tide, and they did for science something which could hardly be rationalized, an exhausting messy job of fixing its very foundation, invisible on the pages of professional journals they kept science both human and humane. This helped me understand why wethe people who work on human rightsrisked our lives in dark alleys in the Soviet
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Union6 or in China7 for someone we did not know. Sharing the same values is the common thread that makes people who live in freedom risk their lives for people who are deprived of freedom. Yuri Tarnopolsky was our first success. Since then we have had many others. I just want to share with you some experiences in my early life that made me decide to devote a good part of my life for the benefit of others. I came to the conclusion that I was lucky to grow up in a developing country where we learned at a very early age to do good for others. This country is called Israel. As juniors in high school, we lived in tents for one month in the south of Israel, close to a city called Eilat on the Red Sea (Figure 1). We
He always emphasized that continuous pressure on the governments from the outside was the best way to help the victims. When the victims learned of this outside support, it gave them courage to persevere, despite their terrible circumstances, because they knew others cared. Another success was the case of Alexander Nikitin, who was arrested when he worked for the Bellona Foundation of Norway.8 Nikitin had identified where the Russians had spilled radioactive material from their submarines into the North Sea. Following this disclosure, the legislature in Russia passed new laws that took effect retroactively, making Nikitin’s activities crimes of espionage. ACS was the lead Society seeking to defend Nikitin in his case. In 2000, while he was still on trial, the ACS’s Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights managed to bring him to an ACS meeting in Washington, DC. Although the only available time for him to lecture was at 9:30 pm, the room was packed with more than 1000 participants and media personnel. We asked ourselves why, when Nikitin was still under house arrest and city arrest, he was allowed to come to the United States. I always said it was because Daryle Busch, who was the ACS president at the time, signed our letters to the Russians; I think they were confused as to which Bush was signing and thus allowed Nikitin to come immediately to the ACS. In addition to chemists, we helped physicists too. Fang Lizhi was the father of the prodemocracy movement in China. After the incidents in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Lizhi escaped to the American Embassy in Beijing. The ACS Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights and other human rights organizations worked very hard to ensure he could leave China. He was sheltered at the American Embassy for a whole year until the U.S. government negotiated his release and he was able to leave China. His first contact with China following this was a speech he gave in Chinese through Voice of America from my office in Chicago.7 We worked on behalf of many people, and the ones mentioned are just a small sample of scientists who regained their freedom as a result of the effort of the ACS Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights. In 1995, I was in China delivering a plenary lecture in the International Conference on the Public Understanding of Science and Technology. I appeared on National Chinese Television and mentioned that I dedicated my plenary lecture to all the scientists who were still in prison and hoped that they would be able to join me at my next lecture. The Americans who attended my lecture were very upset with my mention of the dissidents and the dedication of my lecture to them. Several of the Americans expressed fear that our group would be arrested and we would not be able to leave China. On the other hand, many of the Chinese in the audience gave me a thumbs-up. Cuba was another country that our subcommittee was concerned with. The first trip to Cuba by members of ACS was in 1998 when Paul Walter was the President of ACS. Since then I have gone to Cuba seven times with different groups of ACS members. In a ceremony in Havana, the Cuban Chemical Society made me an honorary member. I had the privilege to meet and talk with Fidel Castro, Jr., who is a nuclear physicist and the science advisor to the President of Cuba. Cuba has been one of the most challenging countries that the Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights has had to deal with because we have to manage both of the two parts of the Subcommittee’s title. We have to advocate for the scientific freedom of the American scientists every time we want to attend a scientific meeting in Cuba. Americans could not just buy a
Figure 1. Tents in an encampment for students near Eilat, Israel, ca. 1954. Photographer unknown.
lived there so we could build roads going from the south to the north. Every month a new group of juniors was brought in to continue the work. It was very hard, but it was a tremendous experience. In Israel, when students graduate from high school, they do not go to college immediately. They go to a different schoolthe Israeli Armywhere they learn how to live and work with others. In the Army, I had to share my room for three months with 50 women, and this taught me skills that no other school could teach. Growing up this way teaches young people how to devote their life to greater causes. I am probably one of the few Americans lucky enough to have met Andrei Sakharov (Figure 2) and discussed with him what
Figure 2. Andrei Sakharov and Zafra Lerman, ca. 1988. Photographer unknown.
ACS’s Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights should do to help the scientists whose human rights were abused. B
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ticket and fly to Cuba. We had to apply for a license from the Department of the Treasury and explain that scientific freedom includes freedom of travel to scientific conferences. The second part of the Subcommittee’s name is Human Rights, and that means we have to acknowledge the record of Cuba’s human rights’ abuses and requires that we fight for the release of scientists who are imprisoned.
experiments with their children at home. On one occasion, I had a visitor from India whom I invited to join me for one of these parent−teacher workshops. When my visitor saw the neighborhood and the building we called school, he asked in a very serious voice if we were still in the United States of America. He told me that he saw schools like that in India, but did not expect to see it in the United States. But despite all these conditions, the parents and teachers came on a regular basis to learn how to use art, music, dance, and drama in order to understand scientific concepts, and how to use household materials to perform science experiments. We showed the teachers, parents, and students how the arts can be a wonderful vehicle for learning, teaching, and assessing science.10 We always brought undergraduate students who represented the cultural demographics of Chicago to work with the group. These students presented their understanding of different scientific concepts to the teachers, parents, and students through different media: paintings, sculptures, songs, dances, drama, poetry, rap, and film. For example, two students in the same class visualized the fission reaction, where a neutron bombards the nucleus of the atom, but they presented it using the media that each felt most comfortable using. One presented it as a computer animation, and another student choreographed it as a dance. Many newspaperslocally, nationally, and internationally published articles describing these methods of teaching science. The Chicago Sun−Times featured two dancers from the dance studio group in a photo: one is sodium and the other one is chlorine. During the dance they formed table salt (sodium chloride). In this way of teaching and assessing, students learn science by using their talent, interests and cultural background. Testimony from the students, teachers and parents, and the analysis by the external evaluation showed that the students really enjoyed this experience and understood the scientific concepts they were taught.11 For the past 15 years, the Gordon Research Conferences have held a conference on science visualization. Most of these conferences were held in Oxford, England, but in 2001 it was held in the United States at Mt. Holyoke College. I managed to raise enough money to bring with me 25 African-American students who had learned chemistry at the dance studio. They ranged in age from 12 to 16. They participated in the Gordon Research Conference on Science Visualization, where they demonstrated to the scientists their understanding of scientific concepts through dance. The audience reacted with a standing ovation and exclamations of “bravo!”, which contributed to the students’ self-confidence and self-esteem.12 The National Science Foundation awarded Jack Shiner from Indiana University, Tom Spiro from Princeton University, and myself a grant to develop a course titled, From Ozone to Oil SpillsChemistry, the Environment, and You. The purpose of this course was to develop a curriculum on environmental chemistry where students were required to show their knowledge by producing projects using the media of their choice. Once a year we would have a joint symposium where students from the different institutions would present their projects to each other and then have a discussion. The evaluation showed that students in this course understood the chemistry concepts, enjoyed the course tremendously, loved the projects, and appreciated the joint symposium.13 These methods of teaching were extended to many institutions in the United States and around the world. In 2000, I received the José Vasconcelos World Award of Education from the World
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EDUCATION As I mentioned earlier, an important tenet in my life is that equal access to science education is a human right that belongs to all. To guarantee science education for all, I have developed methods of teaching and assessing chemistry and science in general at every level, with students from 4 years old to 90 years old, and from formal to informal settings.9 In a very poor neighborhood of Chicago, students, including some who were homeless, came to the Stairway of the Stars studio, where they took dance lessons at night. Sitting on the floor of the dance studio, holding the periodic table, I taught the students chemistry (Figure 3). Other colleagues of mine, also
Figure 3. Science education at a dance studio in Chicago, Illinois, ca. 1997. Photograph by David Morton, used with permission.
devoted to making a change for underprivileged youth, worked with me on developing and implementing this program. These were most unusual conditions for teaching and learning: Not only did we have to bring materials for studying chemistry, but we also brought food and warm clothes for the Chicago winter, which were donated for the children. Many in this program continued on to college and some even to Ph.D. programs. An old African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Therefore, it was important to work with parents and teachers as well as students. In our efforts to improve science teaching in the Chicago public schools, we mixed together students from diverse cultural backgrounds. We made an effort to have Christian, Muslim, and Jewish students study together so they did not just learn chemistry, but also tolerance and appreciation for different religions, races, and cultural backgrounds. The inner-city schools we worked with were often in bad condition with peeling paint, rusty doors, and libraries with very few books. We used one of these libraries, which was on the fourth floor with no elevator, as a lab for teachers and parents to work together and conduct experiments. We used low-cost materials that parents could later obtain to duplicate the C
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Cultural Council. The award was presented at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. This was the first international award in the new, democratic Republic of South Africa, and I took several undergraduate students with me. We stayed for two weeks and worked with children in Soweto, showing them how to use the arts and their cultural background in understanding science. We adopted the Soweto school district and shared with them the materials we used and produced for the Chicago Public Schools from then until 2009.
In 2005, we convened Middle East chemists on the island of Malta again. Once more we had six Nobel Laureates participating. This conference was titled “Malta II”.17 A nucleus of people from Malta I greeted each other like relatives who had been separated for two long years. New participants became immediately part of the group. Nationalities were completely erased as the audience mingled together. A woman from Saudi Arabia sat with a man from Israel discussing their research. A male scientist from Gaza who does research on the undrinkable water in Gaza collaborated with a female scientist from Israel. The Palestinians and the Israelis looked like relatives happy to see each other.18 Again, after five days there was a unanimous decision to continue this important and unique effort. It is not often Israelis and Saudis can be seen talking together and smiling in pictures together. Although the participants are from the Middle East, the percentage of women has been quite high; many of them are directors of research centers and even former science ministers. The women are dressed in different ways, according to the customs in their countries. The camaraderie among these women was very strong. They all referred to each other as “sisters” and continue to communicate with each other. In 2007, Malta III was held in Istanbul, Turkey. We maintained the name “Malta Conferences” because that is where it all started.19 In Malta III, joint proposals were written, especially on the issue of water quality.20 Work on a unified science curriculum for the Middle East started, and solar energy took central stage as the energy source for the future of the Middle East.21 Meanwhile, the global community began to recognize the importance of the conferences. In 2009, before the Malta IV Conference, I was invited to give a talk on the Malta conferences at the Nobel Peace Institute in Oslo, Norway (Figure 4).
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CHEMISTRY AS A BRIDGE TO PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST Since September 2001, all the eyes of the world have been on the Middle East. The ACS Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights believed that it might be possible to use science as a bridge to peace in the Middle East. The idea was to bring together chemists from 15 Middle East countries (Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates) with six Nobel Laureates to work toward solving problems of the region. The Subcommittee brought the idea to the Board of ACS, which enthusiastically supported it and spearheaded the project. IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry), RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry), and the GDCh (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker) joined later as cosponsors.14 The first conference was held in 2003 on the island of Malta. Malta was chosen as the site for the meeting that year because at the height of the Intifada it was necessary to take security measures into account. It is really complicated to get to Malta; there are no direct flights from most countries and it takes a long time for everyone to get there. We calculated that terrorist groups would not bother with so many hassles to attack a group of mostly Muslim, and some Israeli scientists. Scientists from 15 countries in the Middle East were present for the five-day conference. The Nobel Laureates delivered plenary lectures and catalyzed the workshops that were conducted. Topics for five workshops were selected in advance by the participants: 1. Nanotechnology and material science 2. Medicinal chemistry and natural products 3. Alternative energy 4. Science education for all levels 5. EnvironmentAir and water quality The participants worked together on these issues. It was clear to everyone that the borders in the Middle East are only lines on the map and that the environment does not recognize these lines. Therefore, only collaboration between these countries can solve issues of air quality and the most severe issue of the region clean drinking water.15 Although we had a very tough time arranging this meeting because of security concerns, by the end of the meeting, it felt like a family reunion. The participants believed that the conference was unique as it gave them a platform to meet and collaborate with chemists who were not otherwise accessible to each other because many of their governments were hostile to each other. The participants unanimously voted to have another meeting in two years, and therefore, we named the first conference “Malta I”. Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois thought the Malta Conference was important enough to make a speech about it on the floor of the Senate; the speech is in the Congressional Record.16
Figure 4. Lecturing at the Nobel Peace Institute in Oslo, Norway, 2009. Photographer unknown.
In 2009, we held Malta IV in Amman, Jordan. We encountered new challenges. Obtaining a visa for the Iranians to attend the meeting appeared to be impossible, but after six months of continuous contact at high levels of the Jordanian government, we eventually succeeded. Many other obstacles presented themselves, but in the end we managed to overcome all of them. The conference was opened by His Royal Highness Prince Hassan (King Hussein’s brother). In his speech, he emphasized that science and education are the most important vehicles to achieve peace in the Middle East. The conference attendees visited the UNESCO-supported Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME), built in Jordan. D
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(4) See the book jacket notes for: Tarnopolsky, Y. Memoirs of 1984; University Press of America: Lanham, MD, 1993. (5) Tarnopolsky, Y. Personal communication, 1988. (6) Lerman, Z. M. Scientific Freedom and Human Rights in the Soviet Union. CHED Newsletter (American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Education) 1989. (7) Lerman, Z. M. Report on Human Rights in China. CHED Newsletter (American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Education) 1992. (8) Home Page of The Bellona Foundation. http://www.bellona.org/ (accessed Aug 2012). (9) Lerman, Z. M. Using the Arts To Make Chemistry Accessible to Everybody. J. Chem. Educ. 2003, 80, 1234−1243. (10) Hoffmann, R.; Torrence, V. Chemistry Imagined: Reflections on Science; Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, DC, 1993. (11) Lerman, Z. M. Visualizing the Chemical Bond. Chem. Educ. Int. 2001, 2 (1), 6−13. http://www.iupac.org/publications/cei/vol2/ 0201x0006.html (accessed Aug 2012). (12) Lerman, Z. M. Chemistry: An Inspiration for Theatre and Dance. Chem. Educ. Int. 2005, 6, 1. (13) Lerman, Z. M. From Ozone to Oil Spills: Incorporating Technology into the Classroom. Paper presented at the Jerusalem International Science and Technology Education Conference, Jerusalem, Israel, January 8−11, 1996. (14) Freemantle, M. Rendezvous in the Mediterranean. Chem. Eng. News 2004, 82 (2), 36−39. (15) Langer, S. Middle East Talks Hailed as “Pugwash” for Chemical Sciences at Malta Convention. Chem. World 2004, 1 (1), 6. (16) Durbin, R. Chemists Working Cooperatively. U.S. Congr. Rec. 2004, 150, 66. (17) Ritter, S. K. Science for Peace in the Middle East. Chem. Eng. News 2005, 83 (46), 15. (18) Velasquez, R. Middle Eastern Scientists Promote Peace at Malta Conference. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 2006, 25 (1), 71. (19) Malin, J. Middle East Chemists Meet in Istanbul. Chemistry International 2008, 30 (3), 31−34. (20) IUPAC Wire. Water in the Gaza Strip. Chemistry International 2008, 30 (2), 18. (21) Lerman, Z. M. Chemistry and Chemical Education as a Bridge to Peace. In Chemistry Education in the ICT Age; Gupta Bhowon, M., Jhaumeer-Laulloo, S., Li Kam Wah, H., Ramasami, P., Eds.; Springer: New York, 2009; pp 1−10. (22) More updated information on the Malta Conferences (and some photographs) can be found at http://www.MaltaConferencesFoundation.org (accessed Aug 2012). (23) Kohn, W. Personal communication, December 2007.
The group who wrote the proposal in Malta III to work on the issue of water in the Middle East received funding, and held their first reporting meeting during Malta IV. Again, the decision was made to continue this important conference, which still is the only platform where Israelis, Iranians, and Arabs can collaborate freely and socialize with each other for five days. By invitation from UNESCO, Malta V was held at UNESCO’s Headquarters in Paris as part of the International Year of Chemistry in December 2011. The conference was opened by the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, and followed by a speech by HRH Prince Hassan on his vision of the new Middle East.22 The success of the Malta Conferences was expressed through a statement from Nobel Laureate Walter Kohn, who wrote the following in an e-mail on December 2007 to all the participants:23 Our great Middle East Chemistry meeting in Istanbul for which we are most grateful to Zafra was for mean elderly freshmana thrilling experience. The unfailingly friendly and cooperative tone, the excellent presentations, from basic science to urgent local and regional problems; the enjoyable banquets with opportunities for informally meeting colleagues with very different backgrounds and perspectivesyet all of us united by our love of science and commitment to its use for the benefit of mankind.... I was a postdoc at Bohr’s Institute for Atomic Physics in Copenhagen in the early 1950s. From Niels Bohr, I learned not only many wonderful things about science as science, but also about the exceptional opportunity science offers to open up national, ethnic, political and religious boundaries. His own Institute was, and is, a very successful example of these principles.... Malta seems to me to follow in the same great tradition. May it continue to go from strength to strength. This article illustrates why human rights, education, and peace are intertwined. The advantage of receiving the Pimentel Award is being able to talk to a room full of friends. The greatest achievement in life is to have so many friends among your colleagues.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
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REFERENCES
(1) Zafra J. Margolin Lerman is a chemistry educator, President of the Malta Conferences Foundation, Chair of the American Chemical Society’s International Activities Committee Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (1985−2010), and President of MIMSAD, Inc. (Methods Integrating Music, Science, Art, and Dance), a not-for-profit organization promoting arts-based science education. She received the 2010 George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education on March 23, 2010, in San Francisco, CA. This paper is adapted from her award address. (2) The American Chemical Society’s Office of International Activities has a Web site on Scientific Mobility and Human Rights at http://portal. acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ SUPERARTICLE&node_id=476 (accessed Aug 2012). (3) Thayer, A. 1989: George C. Pimentel (1922−1989). Chem. Eng. News 2008, 88, 1. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/priestley/recipients/ 1989pimentel.html (accessed Aug 2012). E
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