Science And Technology In The Middle East

Science and Technology in the Middle East is the first volume in the series to be published. It covers the Middle East Arab States, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. The detailed survey of research and development in the area is introduced by an informed commentary on science development in the Middle East over the past five years which deals with the major regional issues of manpower, the brain drain, technology transfer, science education, pollution, and the environment, Arabization, and Islamic science.

Research for Development in the Middle East and North Africa

The Middle East plays a major role in the history of genetic science. Early in the twentieth century, technological breakthroughs in human genetics coincided with the birth of modern Middle Eastern nation-states, who proclaimed that the region's ancient history—as a cradle of civilizations and crossroads of humankind—was preserved in the bones and blood of their citizens. Using letters and publications from the 1920s to the present, Elise K. Burton follows the field expeditions and hospital surveys that scrutinized the bodies of tribal nomads and religious minorities. These studies, geneticists claim, not only detect the living descendants of biblical civilizations but also reveal the deeper past of human evolution. Genetic Crossroads is an unprecedented history of human genetics in the Middle East, from its roots in colonial anthropology and medicine to recent genome sequencing projects. It illuminates how scientists from Turkey to Yemen, Egypt to Iran, transformed genetic data into territorial claims and national origin myths. Burton shows why such nationalist appropriations of genetics are not local or temporary aberrations, but rather the enduring foundations of international scientific interest in Middle Eastern populations to this day.

This book, first published in 1977, aims to present a Muslim view of development and highlights some of the related issues that were being debated in the Muslim world. The author outlines the parameters of the Muslim world as well as the Muslim world-view, and provides an analysis of science, science policy and Muslim culture. This title will be of interest to students of economic and social policy, as well as students of Middle Eastern studies.

The effort to innovate and develop very often takes the form of creating and nurturing what we have called STPs. We need now a more precise definition; under this name I tried to include various deliberate attempts to plan and promote, within one concentrated area, technologically innovative, industrial-related production: technology parks, and science cities. This study will try to assess how these different developments perform (or fail to perform) their role as engines of the new round of economic development and as organizing nodes of the new industrial space besides analyzing the Jordanian prospect towards establishing STPs. Comprehension of the STP phenomenon has been so blurred by political, ideological, and business biases that any serious study must start from a careful analysis of how these centers were created and developed, and of the factors that account for their differential success, according to a set of criteria that must be established at the start. Several basic planning and design criteria were thus deduced/derived from the analysis of these world-famous STPs,

The contributors address the history, originality, variety and sophistication of traditional science, technology and material culture in the Middle East and Central Asia, their influence on the history of Europe and the West, and the threat posed by modern Western technologies.