The SESAME facility, under construction in Jordan
Image courtesy of SESAME
Any chance for Badran to advance his agenda went up with the smoke in November 2005 when suicide bombers targeted the three Amman hotels. As the government shifted its focus from internal reform to security, Badran was a casualty of change. The prime minister here serves at the discretion of the king—and also, many people say, by tacit approval of Jordan’s security services. In less than a year, Badran was ousted (his thinking was considered to be too idealistic for that time) and returned to his seat in the senate.
After leaving Badran, I get a primer on Jordan’s most dynamic and hopeful scientific collaboration. I speak with physicist Hamed Tarawneh at his cramped, dingy temporary office at UNESCO’s headquarters in Amman. Tarawneh, a tall, broad-shouldered chain-smoker with a disarming smile, left years ago to get his Ph.D. in Sweden and returned to Jordan just a few months prior to our meeting. He is in the process of assembling a staff of engineers and technicians for SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East), an international laboratory organized around a machine that has wide applications in physics, biology, medicine, and archaeology. Only a handful of these versatile light generators exist, and this is the first in the Muslim world.
Jordan was selected as the site for SESAME after King Abdullah II donated land and ponied up $10 million for the facility that would house the synchrotron. The project is modeled on CERN, the Swiss high-energy physics lab formed after World War II to restore Europe’s tradition of scientific learning. When SESAME becomes fully operational in 2009—the facility at Al-Balqa Applied University near Amman should be complete this June—researchers will rotate through doing their work in weeks-long sessions. Like its European model, SESAME was conceived in part to motivate the region’s best and brightest to stay, or even to return from abroad; the laboratory should also create excitement and opportunity that will attract young students to science.
Tarawneh hopes SESAME will become a knowledge hub for the member states that pay annual dues, a group that now includes Bahrain, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, the Palestinian Authority—and Israel, the one country in the region that has a knowledge-based society but has been excluded from almost every other endeavor. “We are scientists,” Tarawneh says. “We don’t care about politics. So now we have a chance to discuss science here and work for the greater good of knowledge. It’s a very good start. It’s a cosmopolitan environment, which is what we’ve been lacking. Now we’ll all know each other as scientists, as people.”
I ask about the legions of scientists who have left Jordan, who regard it as a lost cause.
“Would I earn more if I went to Berkeley?” Tarawneh asks. “Yes, of course. But I am from here. I am an Arab. I am a Muslim. This is where I want to be. And why can’t we build something here that’s ours? In five years, others will see it’s useful, and it will become a world effort and create a culture of scientific inquiry here. Science is the way to break barriers. It’s about development and advancing people’s interests.”
Tarawneh’s enthusiasm makes SESAME’s success seem inevitable, but the king’s support and the international character of the project make it seem like much more than an individual triumph. It is precisely the kind of regional partnership that people like Prince Hassan say is the real road map to peace and prosperity in the Islamic world. As both machine and metaphor, a high-powered generator that shines light on scientific inquiry may be the answer to everyone’s prayers.
