Science in Pakistan

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00:00:15.06 I was born in Karachi, Pakistan, but left the country at an early state, around the time of the Bangladesh war.
00:00:23.03 And I have trained largely in the United States where I was a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics
00:00:35.02 at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
00:00:37.09 where the majority of my career was spent.
00:00:41.04 However, I have made attempts, and I am going to describe my most recent attempt,
00:00:48.13 to re-engage with research and higher education in Pakistan.
00:00:54.07 So the first attempt was made right after my postdoctoral work
00:00:59.20 at Caltech, where I went to Pakistan in the mid 1980s, that was the time of Zia-ul-Haq regime.
00:01:09.09 But realized very soon that A) the timing was not favorable,
00:01:15.14 and B) I was not of a sufficient maturity myself in my career to make a difference.
00:01:23.05 And so I returned. And then I re-engaged more recently, and this is the period that I want to talk about.
00:01:34.09 So Pakistan is actually... the land of Pakistan is very ancient.
00:01:42.15 I mean this is the land of Indus Valley civilizations.
00:01:47.24 The land where the Vedic culture, the Vedic literature was developed.
00:01:53.22 The land that saw the Golden Age of Buddhism under the Indo-Greek kingdoms.
00:02:01.11 And then the flowering of Sufism in the 14th and 15th centuries with the arrival of Islam.
00:02:12.07 Modern Pakistan starts with after the British left India in 1947,
00:02:24.18 to create the modern states of India and Pakistan.
00:02:30.11 So my second re-engagement with Pakistan began about 2005,
00:02:35.21 and it was for a variety of personal and professional reasons.
00:02:40.04 But a major motivating factor were the positive changes that had been wrought in Pakistan
00:02:47.12 by the then military government of General Musharraf.
00:02:52.00 And there was a higher education commission, which had a status of a ministry that was founded in the early 2000s.
00:03:04.01 And this Commission realized that in order to interface Pakistani science
00:03:11.12 with the international community, they needed to attract first of all of the expatriates who were outside,
00:03:18.27 and second, send the younger scientists abroad for training.
00:03:24.11 So they established the foreign faculty hiring program,
00:03:29.17 and indeed I was the first senior, or one of the first, senior professors hired under this program
00:03:36.16 to go back and consult with the government.
00:03:40.20 And I went back and I was based at the premier institute for molecular biology there,
00:03:46.14 the Center for Molecular Biology in Lahore, Pakistan,
00:03:50.09 which is one of our biggest and indeed most historic cities.
00:03:54.11 And I was and continue to be on the advisory committee of the Pakistan Higher Education Commission,
00:04:06.14 advising them on matters of biotechnology
00:04:08.29 and guiding them in order to send young scientists abroad to establish foreign collaborations.
00:04:17.06 So a lot has been done, and again just to give a brief history of the infrastructure.
00:04:24.24 So there has been a tradition first of all of physics,
00:04:32.14 which has been nurtured by theoretical physicists, Abdus Salam and his students.
00:04:41.23 So there is a strong physics tradition due to the Salam school.
00:04:48.02 And that carries on with the International Center for Theoretical Physics,
00:04:54.29 which has many links with Pakistani institutions.
00:04:59.27 During British India, the University of Punjab in Lahore was one of the major universities of British India.
00:05:11.15 And it had as its alumni people like Gobind Khorana in organic chemistry.
00:05:19.01 People like Chandrasekhar in physics.
00:05:22.09 Organic chemistry again has a tradition.
00:05:25.18 So Khorana is part of that tradition, but they have other organic chemists
00:05:32.00 that have flowered and trained in Lahore and other Pakistani universities.
00:05:39.27 In biology, the modern biology that is for molecular biology really came from a US/Pakistani expatriate, Ahmad Bukhari,
00:05:52.23 who worked on Mu phage in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories.
00:05:57.11 And Ahmad went back and he recruited people like Riazuddin,
00:06:03.19 who is the Director of the Center of Excellence in Molecular Biology
00:06:09.15 to really establish molecular biology in this country.
00:06:13.01 In fact my first trip to Pakistan in the mid '80s was made on the prompting of Ahmad Bukhari,
00:06:20.24 and I hooked up with Riazuddin to set up what was then a nascent institute, the Center for Molecular Biology.
00:06:29.08 And now there are a number of such institutes. There is a very nice group in Quaid-i-Azam.
00:06:36.12 The Kahuta lab by Hasumati???. The National Center for Engineering and Biotechnology Gorsumelek???.
00:06:44.21 So there's a lot going on, a lot going on in Pakistan that is good.
00:06:52.02 There are a lot of initiatives that are positive and, you know,
00:06:58.07 are the effort of both expatriates as well as, I think, the international community to support those efforts.
00:07:06.02 There are problems which I think are intrinsic really to developing societies.
00:07:12.14 And let me just touch on those very briefly.
00:07:17.20 Pakistan is not immune to those, but you know, even much larger
00:07:25.02 and established scientific cultures like India and China
00:07:29.07 have these problems. So what are the problems?
00:07:31.26 Well, one as we've discussed, is the isolation.
00:07:37.23 So now what that isolation leads to directly is outdated curricula,
00:07:44.06 outdated syllabi, inroad learning, and an inability of different disciplines
00:07:52.18 to come together to form interfacial disciplines,
00:07:57.17 which certainly in biology and chemistry represent a lot of the modern, cutting edge science.
00:08:05.28 So that's one issue that we are addressing at various levels.
00:08:13.02 The other issue is basically you have a culture, a scientific culture,
00:08:23.19 that is based on hierarchy and patronage.
00:08:30.07 So the problem becomes, how do we get our young people to flourish,
00:08:35.22 to stay, to feel... to have a stake in the enterprise and contribute to it.
00:08:41.13 And here again I think there are lots of initiatives being taken.
00:08:48.28 And I think, I've touched on the national thing. International efforts like the Gates Foundation and so on,
00:08:56.11 are again, excellent initiatives that inspire a lot of young scientists in Pakistan,
00:09:05.13 and elsewhere in the developing world.
00:09:09.03 And then there is the issue of sending them abroad.
00:09:15.10 Now the problem there is the peer review system.
00:09:22.08 Who do you decide to send abroad? How do you acknowledge merit?
00:09:28.05 What is the nature of the scientific collaboration?
00:09:31.16 And again, I think a problem in Pakistan, and I am sure other developing countries, is
00:09:39.02 that the expertise to offer competent peer review and to encourage merit is thin on the ground.
00:09:46.12 So there are a few visionaries, but you don't have the critical mass that is needed to recognize
00:09:55.12 quality work, to recognize creativity, and reward it accordingly.
00:10:01.00 So, I think that is an issue, but again I think that issue is being addressed.
00:10:10.07 And I think the other issue, again, very natural for any developing society,
00:10:17.25 is the balance between applied and pure science.
00:10:21.03 So you have problems that need urgent solutions, like roads need to be built. Bridges need to be built.
00:10:30.01 There needs to be enough food on the table for more people. So those are the problems,
00:10:37.17 but then in order to poise any society for the future,
00:10:42.25 investment has to be made in the basic sciences.
00:10:44.28 The basic fundamentals have to be good in order to set the stage for innovation and creativity.
00:10:53.07 So let me end with, you know, what I've done in my second tenure there,
00:11:02.00 which was really for about a five year stint now.
00:11:05.16 It will end the summer of 2012. So I went back initially, as I said, to consult with the government,
00:11:14.06 but then accepted an offer or was persuaded by my friend, project manager
00:11:20.05 Khurram Afridi to set up a new school of science and engineering in Pakistan called LUMS.
00:11:26.11 And I, together with Khalid Rasheed of Texas who trained in Heidelberg with Wittig
00:11:34.22 were responsible for setting up the life sciences division.
00:11:38.17 And basically our aim there, and I think to a large extent that aim has been met,
00:11:47.28 has been to focus on the fundamentals,
00:11:52.13 have a no boundaries philosophy so that interfacial disciplines, for example, like nanomaterials or biophysics
00:12:00.29 which is my discipline, have at least a presence.
00:12:06.11 And then set up proper review mechanisms and establish international collaborations.
00:12:15.13 Again the nature of the collaborations is an important one.
00:12:20.25 So you could have a collaboration where basically Pakistan serves as a component
00:12:27.25 to supply raw materials or collect data.
00:12:32.26 Well, that is not an ideal collaboration. I mean it's not for either side.
00:12:40.00 What you want is our people on the ground to be involved in a holistic way
00:12:45.12 in the whole research and development enterprise,
00:12:49.27 and that means that they have to be trained and master the fundamentals.
00:12:55.07 So in biology I have put in great effort to emphasize the value of model systems
00:13:03.18 that are needed not only for the growth of biology,
00:13:07.11 but for the growth of biotechnology or medicine.
00:13:11.03 The value of systems like yeast, E. coli, and so on,
00:13:16.15 and what these systems have achieved and continue to achieve.
00:13:21.12 And, you know, under my tenure we hired Muhammad Tariq,
00:13:26.06 who set up the fly lab, the Drosophila genetics lab,
00:13:30.15 which was I think, has been a major new in Pakistan science.
00:13:38.29 So essentially there are a lot of challenges, but I think there is a lot of hope.
00:13:46.29 And in particular what I have been impressed with is the dynamism of Pakistani scientific society,
00:13:55.08 and indeed of Pakistan society as a whole.
00:13:57.22 So I think, yes indeed there are challenges, but we will surmount them.

This Talk

Speaker: Shahid Khan

Audience:

Student
Researcher

Recorded: September 2012

Talk Overview

After many years as a successful scientist in the USA, Khan accepted an invitation to return to Pakistan to advise the government on improving higher education in the sciences and to help set up a new life sciences program at a prestigious Pakistani university. In this talk, he gives a personal account of the challenges, opportunities and excitement of doing science in Pakistan today.

Speaker Bio

Shahid Khan

Khan is the founding head of Lifesciences at LUMS School of Science and Engineering. Khan is currently a senior scientist with the Molecular Biology Consortium, a non-profit research group focused on imaging biological structures and based at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where he studies the structural dynamics of systems involved in cell motility. Continue Reading