Iranian researchers have announced the birth of Iran and the Middle East’s first transgenic animals in the Rouyan Research Institute in Isfahan.

A transgenic animal is one that carries a foreign gene, constructed using recombinant DNA methodology, in its genome. Sheep and goats produced through this method express foreign proteins in their milk and are, therefore, considered valuable sources of protein for human therapy.

Such animals are commonly produced in countries such as the US, France, the UK, Japan, Denmark, Canada, Scotland, the Netherlands, and China to extract alpha-antitrypsin, plasminogen activating factor, factor VIII, fibrinogen, lactoalbumin, lactoferrin, human albumin, collagen I and II, and monoclonal antibodies from their milk.

The two Iranian transgenic kids named ‘Shangoul’ and ‘Mangoul’, the leading characters of a famous traditional children’s story in Iran, were born in Rouyan Institute on Saturday morning.

“The two kids are in a good health condition,” said Hamid Gourabi, the head of Rouyan Research Institute.

Tests revealed high concentrations of human factor IX, an anticoagulant agent used to treat patients with hemophilia B, in their blood. More time, however, is needed to study the availability of the factor in their milk.

A lamb named ‘Royana’, a kid named ‘Hanna’ and two calves named ‘Bonyana’ and ‘Tamina’ were the first animals successfully cloned in the country.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=117456&sectionid=3510208

An exhibition that has just opened at the Science Museum is celebrating 1,000 years of science from the Muslim world.

From about 700 to 1700, many of history’s finest scientists and technologists were to be found in the Muslim world.

In Christian Europe the light of scientific inquiry had largely been extinguished with the collapse of the Roman empire. But it survived, and indeed blazed brightly, elsewhere.

From Moorish Spain across North Africa to Damascus, Baghdad, Persia and all the way to India, scientists in the Muslim world were at the forefront of developments in medicine, astronomy, engineering, hydraulics, mathematics, chemistry, map-making and exploration.

A new touring exhibition, hosted by the Science Museum in London, celebrates their achievements.

There is a whole area of science that is literally just lost in translation Dr Susan Mossman, Science Museum

Salim Al-Hassani, a former professor of engineering at Umist (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) is a moving force behind the exhibition, 1001 Inventions.

He calls it “edutainment”: a series of displays devoted to different aspects of science meant to be both educational and entertaining.

“We hope to inspire the younger generation to take up a career in science and technology and to be interested in improving the quality of societies,” he says.

Mix of cultures

Visitors to the exhibition will be greeted by a 20 ft high replica of a spectacular clock designed in 1206 by the inventor Al-Jazari.

It incorporates elements from many cultures, representing the different cultural and scientific traditions which combined and flowed through the Muslim world.

Young people took the chance to explore the interactive exhibits

The clock’s base is an elephant, representing India; inside the elephant the water-driven works of the clock derive from ancient Greece.

A Chinese dragon swings down from the top of the clock to mark the hours. At the top is a phoenix, representing ancient Egypt.

Sitting astride the elephant and inside the framework of the clock are automata, or puppets, wearing Arab turbans.

Elsewhere in the exhibition are displays devoted to water power, the spread of education (one of the world’s first universities was founded by a Muslim woman, Fatima al-Fihri), Muslim architecture and its influence on the modern world and Muslim explorers and geographers.

There is a display of 10th Century surgeons’ instruments, a lifesize model of a man called Abbas ibn Firnas, allegedly the first person to have flown with wings, and a model of the vast 100 yard-long junk commanded by the Muslim Chinese navigator, Zheng He.

Outside the main exhibition is a small display of exhibits drawn from the Science Museum’s own collection.

They include a 10th Century alembic for distilling liquids, an astrolable for determining geographical position (and the direction of Mecca - important for Muslims uncertain which way to face when praying).

Also on display is an algebra textbook published in England in 1702, whose preface traces the development of algebra from its beginnings in India, through Persia, the Arab world and to Europe.

Dr Susan Mossman, project director at the museum, says: “There is a whole area of science that is literally just lost in translation.

“Arabic and Muslim culture particularly is a little-known story in Britain. This is a real opportunity to show that hidden story.”

She says the hands-on exhibition suits the museum’s style, which she describes as “heavy-duty scholarship produced in a user-friendly way and underpinned by academic research”.

She adds: “We are opening people’s eyes to a new area of knowledge - a cultural richness of science and technology that has perhaps been neglected in this country.”

Intellectual climate

There is one big question the exhibition does not address: why, after so many centuries, did the Muslim world’s scientific leadership falter? From the 16th Century onwards it was in Europe that modern science developed, and where scientific breakthroughs increasingly occurred.

Visitors are able to get close up to the replica of the 13th century clock

Prof Al-Hassani has his own theory, though there are others. Science flourished in the Muslim world for so long, he believes, because it was seen as expanding knowledge in the interests of society as a whole.

But in the later Middle Ages, the Muslim world came under attack from Europeans (in the Crusades) and the Mongols (who sacked Baghdad in 1258) and the Ottoman Turks overran the remnants of the Byzantine empire, setting up a formidably centralised state.

The need for defence against external enemies combined with a strong centralised government which put less value on individuals’ scientific endeavour resulted in an intellectual climate in which science simply failed to flourish, he says.

The free exhibition runs from 21 January to 25 April with a break between 25 February and 12 March.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8472111.stm

Quantum physicist Jim Al-Khalili grew up in Iraq and has become an expert on the golden age of Islamic science. He explains to Sanjida O’Connell how science in the Muslim world will flourish once more

Few westerners know about the golden age of Arabic science. How did it come about?

The Arab empire was hugely powerful by late 8th and early 9th century; its rulers were getting taxes from across the empire and had money to spend on translations and patronage of scholarship. About this time the House of Wisdom was set up in Baghdad by one of the Abbasid caliphs, al-Ma’mun. It began as a translation house, translating Greek texts into Arabic and rapidly started to attract the greatest minds in the Islamic world, while Arabic became the international language of science. There was also a strong influence from Persia; an Arab scholar once said, “We Arabs have all the words but you Persians have all the ideas.”

In the west there is a widely held misconception that the Islamic world did no more than act as steward of Greek science

In fact, an incredible number of important and original advances were made by Arab scientists, who were the first to undertake real science - theory and experimentation - several hundred years before the scientific revolution in Europe.

Can you give an example of this legendary Arabic science?

An Islamic mathematician, al-Khwarizmi, wrote a book, the title of which gives us the word algebra from the Arabic al-jabr, which means “restoration”. He is regarded as the father of algebra but I wasn’t sure whether this was true. It turns out that no one was really doing proper algebra until he came along. The concept of an equation that you solve to find the unknown quantity, x, goes back to this one scholar. There’s also a scholar whom I regard as the greatest physicist of the medieval world, Ibn al-Haytham, who used geometry to prove how vision works. It’s obvious to us now but at the time no one understood that light travels in straight lines.

Why did Arabic science go into decline?

Some say it went into decline in the 11th century because Islam suddenly took a turn for orthodoxy and conservatism and became anti-scientific. There’s also an argument that it went into decline with the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, which destroyed Baghdad, including the House of Wisdom.

The truth is that the decline in Arabic science happened much more slowly than people think: there were great scholars in the Islamic world all the way up to and including the 15th century.

Why is this era of science so little known in the western world?

Europe was flush with money around the time the Islamic empire was fragmenting. When the Renaissance began, Europeans went through the same process that the early Muslims did: they learned Arabic and rediscovered Greek texts that had been translated into Arabic. So we really only know about those scholars whose work was translated from Arabic into Latin. One of the greatest philosophers of Islam, Ibn Sina, is known in Europe as Avicenna. His work was very easy to get hold of and it hugely influenced European philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon.

Some argue that colonialism played a role. When the British and the French were invading Asia, the Middle East and Africa they didn’t want to hear that these places were once wonderful, flourishing civilisations; in order to justify what they were doing, they had to show that these people were ignorant savages.

So do you think there’s an element of racism to the suppression of Arabic science?

In a sense, yes. It’s tied in with modern-day Islamophobia and the idea that all Muslims have backward attitudes to life, from women to politics; and there’s the additional tension because of fundamentalism and terrorism. So there is a natural tendency to think that surely these people couldn’t really have been far more civilised and advanced than us.

Is it true that what really concerns you is that the Islamic world itself isn’t proud enough of its own heritage?

Yes, it is a shame that there are anti-scientific attitudes in Islam today, almost to the level of - why do you want to go and do science, it’s all written in the Qur’an? The Muslim world needs to be reminded where it was 1000 years ago: it was tolerant of other religions, it was enlightened, it was doing curiosity-driven science.

Many developing countries have poured money into science but only to drive their economy. You won’t get real advances in science - real blue-sky thinking - unless you forget about what might come out of it and you do science for the sake of it. That’s what the Islamic world was like 1000 years ago and until it gets back to that sort of mindset it will always be trying to catch up with the rest of the world.

The King of Saudi Arabia has created a new university, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Could that lead to a renaissance in Islamic science?

The king has specifically said that he wants KAUST to be the new House of Wisdom, so I hope so. A lot of leading western universities are falling over each other to join in collaborations with KAUST hopefully not just because of money, but because they think there’s going to be some real, fundamental research carried out there. Billions of dollars of Saudi oil money have gone into building the university in less than three years. KAUST does seem to be genuinely interested in doing pure, curiosity-driven research - not research to support the oil industry or any political or religious agenda. There are other pockets of excellence and we will see it tentatively growing: the Qatar Foundation is trying to transform their universities into something much more modern and blue-sky research driven. The Royan Institute, a genetics lab in Tehran, Iran, is also doing remarkable work.

Are any of these institutions operating under any constraints?

At the Royan Institute a religious body oversees what research fits into the remit of Islamic teaching. Even KAUST has to be very politically sensitive about what it’s doing. After all, Saudi Arabia is an Islamic country and many people are anti-science.

Your own research is into quantum physics. What was your biggest breakthrough?

The “quantum” world of atoms behaves very differently to the everyday world of Newtonian physics. I apply quantum physics to the atomic nucleus: understanding what it looks like, how its constituents - the protons and neutrons - all fit together. For years we’ve thought of the protons and neutrons as being tightly packed together inside the nucleus. But what we’ve discovered is that some neutrons can orbit the rest of the nucleus much further away than we’d thought. My most cited paper was one in which I’d calculated the size of this “halo cloud”.