On Nov. 25, 2009, at 10 a.m. California time, I was scheduled to conduct a phone interview with Kurt Wüthrich, who was at his office at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. Between 2009 and 2014, I worked as a reporter for Daneshmand magazine, Iran’s longest-running popular science periodical, covering the intersection of science, knowledge and society.
A U.S.-based Swiss scientist, Wüthrich had won the 2002 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and our interview was one of the first chapters in what became an effort to foster dialogue between Iran and the world through journalism. The effort continued for several years, before being cut short by administrative changes that turned a previously esteemed publication, in print since 1963, into yet another outlet for state-run publicity.
My first attempt to interview Wüthrich was unsuccessful. From Rasht, Iran, I called the number shared by his assistant. Although they could hear me speaking on the phone, I couldn’t hear anything. The research assistant called back several times, but they couldn’t reach me. Even using international calling credit cards, it wasn’t easy for ordinary citizens to get around the constraints of Iran’s fledgling telecommunications sector.
We agreed to do the interview in writing over the next few days. The outcome appeared in the February 2010 edition of Daneshmand. Shortly after it was published, I mailed a copy of the printed magazine to the Scripps office in La Jolla, a neighborhood of San Diego. I did the same with most of the subsequent interviews I conducted with Nobel Prize laureates in four disciplines: chemistry, economic sciences, medicine and physics.
Those interviews were the brainchild of a casual conversation I had with the magazine’s chief editor at the time, a few months into our work together. A seasoned journalist, he proposed that we do something to bridge the gap between Iran’s academic community and the world, and specifically to explore pathways that might enable young Iranian science aficionados to learn from the most distinguished American scientists.
Over the past few decades, the Iran-U.S. diplomatic stalemate has blocked most avenues for dialogue between the two nations, despite the bonds that connected them for a long time preceding the 1979 revolution. The political and economic corollaries of this alienation aside, Iranians and Americans have been deprived of the chance to hear from each other’s best minds and engage in the simplest forms of academic exchange.
My editor and I concurred that journalism had the power to deliver change and push the boundaries even in the most dire of times. In response to his call, I put forward the idea of conducting interviews with Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences. We wanted to ask them not only about their breakthroughs, but their careers, worldviews and their advice for young people, including those who had the passion to thrive but not the opportunity.
The initiative endured for five years, resulting in nearly 30 exclusive interviews that animated an otherwise isolated community and drew heartwarming feedback from institutions worldwide. Despite our primary goal of engaging American scientists, I also interviewed Australian, British and European Nobel Prize recipients. The common denominator was that they were the most stellar scientists in their fields, predominantly working at U.S. universities.
After contending with technical inconvenience in my first interview, I considered alternatives. Experimenting with reporting while studying in an undergraduate program in English literature, I asked a former professor for technical assistance. He offered me his office space to make calls and record them. Despite restrictions on the public use of landlines for overseas communication, universities retained the equipment and wiring that made international calls practicable.
The stopgap solution worked. In night shifts that took me to the university campus when it was almost uninhabited and rather dark, I would hobble my way through the unlit labyrinths of the administrative building, use the keychain the professor had lent me to access his office and ensconce myself there for the next several hours to do the interviews. This is how I could catch up with the time difference while it was early morning on the U.S. West Coast and in the Midwest.
Ultimately, I had to find other means, since constantly requesting that my lecturers share their offices wasn’t sustainable. I learned about internet service providers in Tehran that were rolling out internet calling tools. They were helpful — and, of course, expensive. Making the calls from home, I’d often incur staggering phone bills at the end of the month that my parents didn’t explicitly criticize but were clearly dismayed at.
With every new interview, I realized that the Iranian youths’ appetite for learning from revered academics, who would otherwise probably engage with them directly only on rare occasions, was unending. The conversations were gestating in the Orwellian climate of the second presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and any communication with U.S.-based institutions and researchers, if untethered from the government, would be viewed skeptically.
Sometimes, unorthodox developments would upend the dominant pattern of bitterness. On Oct. 15, 2007, Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., a Princeton University professor who was best known for his discovery of a new type of pulsar that earned him the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics, gave a speech at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.
Nicknamed Iran’s MIT, Sharif had occasionally hosted delegations of American scientists traveling to Iran as part of a program sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences in partnership with the Association of American Universities, informally known as “science for peace.” It was built on the prototype that sought to incubate direct lines of contact between American and Soviet scientists during the Cold War.
This is the same program that also brought Nobel laureate in economics Thomas Schelling and physics laureate Burton Richter to Iran. The late F. Sherwood Rowland, the 1995 Nobel laureate in chemistry, was the first distinguished scientist to be invited to the country through the rare partnership, which involved high-stakes diplomacy, months-long — and even years-long — logistical coordination, and misfortunes.
During his December 2008 visit to Iran, Glenn Schweitzer, the former director of the Office for Central Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. National Academies, was briefly interrogated at his hotel by unidentified men associated with the intelligence apparatus. Ahead of his departure, he was detained at Tehran airport for several hours. These incidents resulted in the National Academies suspending their cooperation with Iran, pending assurances from Tehran that such arbitrary actions wouldn’t recur, violating the mutual agreements in place.
Upon arriving in the States, Schweitzer said he was delighted to receive a flood of emails and phone calls from his Iranian colleagues expressing their support. He later published two books based on his thorough science diplomacy work with Iran. The second title, released in 2017, was “U.S.-Iran Engagement in Science, Engineering and Health (2010-2016): A Resilient Program but an Uncertain Future.” He passed away in 2023.
Taylor’s talk at Sharif University went down in the history of the institution as a treasured day. William Wulf, the former president of the National Academy of Engineering, was part of the same ensemble of scientists visiting Iran and had first come to the country in 2000. He recounted that Taylor was “treated like a rock star” as 1,400 students squeezed themselves into a 400-seat auditorium to listen to him.
Two years later, when I interviewed Taylor, I asked him to reflect on his 2007 experience and take a deeper dive into his work on radio pulsars and gravitational waves. “I was impressed with the campus, the faculty members I spoke with and with the students,” he said.
“I had little information on which to base any preconceptions about modern Iran. I suppose in some ways I knew more about ancient Persia than about the Iran of today,” he added. “Always it is best to experience another culture at first hand, and I am happy that I have now done so — even in such a short visit.”
He agreed that visibility and geographical location were drivers of recognition bestowed upon scientists in highly industrialized countries. Still, he insisted that knowledge had no boundaries, citing the example of scientists in countries like India and Pakistan being acknowledged by the Nobel Foundation.
When Omar Yaghi, a Jordanian-American molecular chemist of Palestinian descent, was named as one of the three recipients of the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry in October, Taylor’s words found new resonance at a time of rekindled debate around inequities and representation in the public domain, including academia.
“Science is inherently international in scope, but research at its frontiers is often expensive and can be given high social priority only after the more essential needs of citizens have been satisfied,” Taylor told me then. This is well-documented. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, of the top 10 countries producing the most high-impact research, seven are among the world’s 10 wealthiest nations.
The interviews, however, were not conversations for the sake of conversation. It was certainly important to talk to leading scientists whose legacy had transformed scholarly research and added to humanity’s knowledge of the universe. But my covenant with myself was to learn as much as possible about each interviewee’s specialization and their innovations before approaching them.
I didn’t wish to be an uninformed reporter, chatting to luminaries while knowing nothing about their research, asking them only how it felt to be world famous. The question of how they reacted to the surprise call from the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm was always part of the exchanges, but only in conjunction with a full-fledged exploration of their work.
In the process, I learned some basics about quantum physics, the search for life on other planets, evolutionary science, anthropogenic climate change, epidemics and the chemistry of nanoparticles. The scientists helped me craft narratives based on simplified exegeses of their complicated studies. An Iranian audience that had some general ideas about the topics would benefit a lot from those accounts.
Once, in a medical clinic I was visiting as a patient, a doctor talked to me about an interview with a Nobel Prize laureate in physiology he had recently read in Daneshmand. He glowed with joy when he realized I had done the interview. An aspiring inventor from a far-flung city in northwestern Iran obtained my phone number and called me almost every month, expressing his excitement at reading the stories. He later became a freelancer at the magazine.
Harnessing journalism to debunk stereotypes and portray people and places through new prisms was challenging. During my work on the series, I approached every interview with determination and endless trepidation. These weren’t ordinary individuals to talk to, and access wasn’t readily available. I still remember the anxiety of suspense and uncertainty before receiving an answer each time.
But the initiative was something I assumed would be welcomed as a journalistic effort to overcome a history of mistrust outside the disorderly domain of politics. Although the scientists were never less than graceful and generous with their time, the roadblocks along the way made clear that the task wasn’t easy or unaffected by the very politics we were seeking to sidestep.
In 2008, I contacted John. C. Mather, a renowned astrophysicist and cosmologist and 2006 Nobel Prize laureate in physics, with two proposals. I suggested that, in coordination with my academic department at my undergraduate alma mater, I could facilitate his visit to the school to give a talk. I also requested an interview for Daneshmand.
I was immensely excited when he first expressed interest in the prospect of a talk or a videoconference that could, in his words, “help to develop peaceful relations between our nations.” A week later, I received a note from his assistant saying that senior representatives of NASA, where Mather worked, had determined that a talk wouldn’t be possible and that international conditions needed to improve before such an activity could be endorsed.
I pressed them for a written interview. The answer was the same: As a government agency, NASA couldn’t agree to Mather responding to my questions, even in writing. At that point, I could only feel regret. He was similarly disappointed. In retrospect, I believe that sowing division had become so routine that the pursuit of reconciliation must have come across as odd, making it much more conventional to try to thwart it.
It is not that moments of epiphany or jubilation were infrequent as I furthered the initially amorphous project, helping develop it into a more coherent undertaking. In 2011, when I spoke with Cornell University’s theoretical chemist Roald Hoffmann, who won the chemistry Nobel in 1981, he shared with me some photos from his personal archives that I hadn’t seen elsewhere, even though he didn’t explicitly say they were unpublished.
One monochromatic photo showed the 7-year-old Hoffman after World War II. He was born in Poland in 1937, and the earliest stages of his childhood coincided with Nazi Germany’s invasion of his country of birth. He survived the Holocaust and moved to the United States with his mother and stepfather when he was 12.
I found myself more astonished at his character when I learned that he was also a published poet — perhaps the most literary-minded Nobel Prize laureate in sciences, with five poetry collections to his name. On Oct. 30, 2017, Hoffmann was among 90 leading scientists who petitioned Congress to protect the Iran nuclear deal as Donald Trump was warning that he would discard it.
“Since the JCPoA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] imposes strict restrictions and strong verification on Iran’s nuclear program, Congress should act to ensure that the United States remains a party to the agreement,” the signatories wrote. Trump withdrew from the deal on May 8, 2018. When he came back to power in 2025, he sought a new version of the same deal. It remains elusive.
In most of my conversations with these scientists, I could only glean their admiration for Iran and its people, mixed with a regretful disappointment in its current sociopolitical conditions.
In July 2010, it was announced that the Swiss physical chemist and 1991 Nobel laureate in chemistry Richard E. Ernst would be visiting Sharif University that October. The event was called off shortly before the date due to what the Iranian authorities said were developments “unrelated” to the changes in the university administration. In our subsequent email interview, in August 2011, Ernst wrote, “I hope that I will have soon a chance to visit beautiful Iran.” He passed away in 2021 at 87.
“Remember that the present goals of our egomaniac fun society are unsustainable and have to be drastically changed,” he told me. “In this sense do not blindly copy the hollow recipes of today’s leaders, and develop your own concepts for a better future.”
One of the biggest regrets of my career is missing the opportunity to interview the late John F. Nash, the distinguished mathematician and innovator of Nash equilibrium, which revolutionized game theory, and the 1994 Nobel Prize laureate in economics. Many movie fans have watched and adored “A Beautiful Mind,” the film based on his life.
The interview didn’t happen, not because Nash didn’t like the idea of sharing his thoughts or because he thought I was unprepared as a reporter. He was unwilling to participate for the very reasons we were pursuing interviews with prominent American scientists: The wall of mistrust between Iran and the United States had become too formidable, and it needed to be dismantled.
On Feb. 11, 2009, he replied to my interview request with a 135-word message that couldn’t be more poignant. A decade and a half later, some of those words still echo in my head.
“Unfortunately, in relation to your interview proposal, I am like many other Americans, and I am a person who feels constrained, in wisdom and caution, to act in conformity with ‘political correctness,’” he wrote in the opening paragraph.
“At the present time it seems to be ‘incorrect’ for an American (who might attract any attention) to even talk to an Iranian,” he continued. “For example, it is being said that our new President, B. H. Obama, Jr., SHOULD NOT talk with any sort of an Iranian leader.
“Myself, I have no political position at all, but I feel, generally, that it is ‘the wisdom of the times’ to preserve the ‘comparative innocence’ of being politically correct.
“Of course, sooner or later, conditions are almost certain to change, regarding what is or what isn’t politically correct or politically incorrect.”
With the anointment of Ebrahim Raisi as president in 2021, one of the darkest periods of contemporary Iranian history began. Intensified suppression of the press, unprecedented restrictions on civil liberties and the rise of religious fundamentalism pushed Iran to the precipice. The pent-up frustration of Iranians reached a boiling point when the morality police killed Mahsa Amini on Sept. 16, 2022, leading to the nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests that year. A violent government crackdown killed hundreds of people.
Daneshmand, a surviving staple of pre-1979 print media, which had fascinated generations of Iranian tech geeks and space enthusiasts, was one of the unlikely casualties of Raisi’s culture wars. With sweeping administrative reshufflings, the ownership and editorial responsibilities of the publication were handed over to conservative ideologues loyal to the late president.
The magazine’s mission to encourage a survey of the cosmos of science and technology was supplanted by publicity for researchers and nongovernmental organizations affiliated with the state, hyperbolic messaging about Iran’s military advances and recital of banal talking points about the civilian benefits of a national atomic enterprise.
In official jargon, the showbiz of nuclear power plants and military technology had become synonymous with science. Daneshmand, meaning scientist in Persian, was remodeled to merchandise this image.
After leaving the publication, the legacy of the original idea that underpinned the interviews stayed with me. In 2018, I talked to Frances Arnold, the first American woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry, two months after she earned the historic recognition. That conversation was published by a San Francisco-based online magazine.
I continued to experiment with the notion of science journalism, serving as a bridge between estranged nations. I reached out to the noted scientist John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Obama administration, for an extended interview. In my limited capacity, I tried to preserve the momentum.
Today, as hostility between the two nations has spiked to an all-time high, with a military confrontation in June behind us and the possibility of a renewed flare-up in the cards, journalism and science are needed more than ever. Regrettably, both domains are under attack, in both countries.
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