Dr Farouk El Baz

DOHA • The number of scientists in the Arab world is four times lesser than the global average and the brain drain factor is making the situation worse, says a visiting US-based Arab space scientist.

As a space scientist working with NASA in the 1960s and '70s, Dr Farouk El Baz was on the panel of experts which selected the site for Apollo's maiden mission to the moon in 1969. He was actively involved with the five other Apollo moon missions.

El Baz, a geologist who migrated from his home country Egypt to the US in 1967, told The Peninsula on the sidelines of a convention of Arab expatriate scientists here yesterday there is no database on Arab scientists living outside the Arab world.

There are tens of thousands of Arab scientists based in non-Arab and Islamic countries and one of the key objectives of the three-day convention being held by the Qatar Foundation is to prepare the scientists' database.

According to El Baz, Egypt is the largest exporter of scientists to the Western world and Japan followed by Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Libya and Morocco, among other Arab countries.

The US is the largest beneficiary of the brain drain from the Arab world after England, Switzerland, Germany and Japan. "We have a very large number of Arab scientists living in Japan as well and they have successfully adapted to the local milieu," he said.

The Arab scientists are from almost every conceivable stream. There are space and nuclear scientists, there are physicists and then there are those specializing in renewable energy, petroleum engineering, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and petrochemicals studies.

The GCC has a small number of scientists and they return after pursuing higher studies in the West to take up lucrative jobs back home.

Explaining why Arab countries churn out fewer scientists than others, El Baz said there is little emphasis in these societies on science and technology and mathematics is not taught correctly.

"In the Arab world, there is a tendency to become rich quickly, so youngsters mostly opt for careers in business management," he stated.

Lack of democratic environment is not the primary reason why Arab scientists flee their countries. It is because they are not permitted to pursue research freely. "They don't want to be dictated to. They feel their hands are tied so they flee."

Arab nations must learn a lesson from India which has been hugely successful in wooing its space scientists, in particular, back home.

Talking of Qatar Foundation's initiative to bring Arab expatriate scientists on a single platform, El Baz said this was the best such effort made by any Arab country so far and it would succeed.

Countries like Libya and Egypt made such an attempt in the 1970s. Saudi Arabia launched a similar effort in the 1980s and more recently, Kuwait and the UAE have been involved in such initiative but with little success, El Baz who now runs a space centre at Boston University in the US, said.