Al-Battani

Al-Battani is sometimes known by a Latinized version of his name, being Albategnius, Albategni or Albatenius. His full name was Abu Abdallah Mohammad ibn Jabir ibn Sinan al-Raqqi al-Harrani al-Sabi al-Battani.
Al-Battani’s father was Jabir ibn Sinan al-Harrani who had a high reputation as an instrument maker in Harran. The name makes the identification certain that al-Battani himself was skilled in making astronomical instruments and there is a good indication that he learnt these skills from his father.

Early Life and Career:

Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Jabir Ibn Sinan al-Battani al-Harrani was born around 858 C.E. in Harran. Battani was first educated by his father Jabir Ibn San’an al-Battani, who also was a well-known scientist. He then moved to Raqqa, situated on the bank of the Euphrates, where he received advanced education and later on flourished as a scholar. At the beginning of the 9th century, he migrated to Samarra, where he worked till the end of his life. His family had been members of the Sabian sect, a religious sect of star worshippers from Harran. Being worshipers of the stars meant that the Sabians had a strong motivation for the study of astronomy. Al-Battani, unlike Thabit, another mathematician from his home town, was not a believer in the Sabian religion. His name “Abu Abdallah Mohammad” indicates that he was certainly a Muslim.
Al-Battani made remarkably accurate astronomical observations at Antioch and ar-Raqqah in Syria. The town of ar-Raqqah, where most of al-Battani’s observations were made, became prosperous when Caliph Harun al-Rashid built several palaces there.
The Fihrist describes al-Battani as one of the most famous observers and a leader in geometry, theoretical and practical astronomy, and astrology. He composed work on astronomy, with tables, containing his own observations of the sun and moon and a more accurate description of their motions than that given in Ptolemy’s “Almagest”.
The main achievements of al-Battani’s are:
• He cataloged 489 stars.
• He refined the existing values for the length of the year, which he gave as 365 days 5 hours 46 minutes 24 seconds, and of the seasons.
• He calculated 54.5″ per year for the precession of the equinoxes and obtained the value of 23° 35′ for the inclination of the ecliptic.
Rather than using geometrical methods, as other scientists had done, al-Battani used trigonometric methods which were an important advancement. Al-Battani showed that the farthest distance of the Sun from the Earth varies and, as a result, annular eclipses of the Sun are possible as well as total eclipses. Al-Battani is important in the development of science for a number of reasons, but one of these must be the large influence his work had on scientists such as Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus.

Death:

Historians all agree that Al-Battani passed away in 317 H. /929 A.D., near the city of Moussul in Iraq. He was regarded as one of the most famous Arab astronomers. He dedicated all his life until his death to the observation of planets and stars.

Ahmed Zewail

Ahmed Hassan Zewail is an Egyptian scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 – the first of his race to win such accolade in the field of Science. He is known to be the Father of femtochemistry because of his marvelous works in the area of Physical Chemistry. Zewail is a Physics professor, the Linus Pauling Chair Professor in Chemistry and the Physical Biology Centre director for the UST or the Ultrafast Science and Technology at the prestigious school of California Institute of Technology. Ahmed Zewail is a true living legacy of Science, technology, and innovation that he made his tools into helping Egypt progress as a society in any generation.

Personal Life and Education

Ahmed Zewail came to life in Damanhour, Egypt on the 26th of February, 1946. He was raised in Alexandria by his parents, his father being a mechanic who assembled motorcycles and bicycles and later won a spot in the government local service. His parents were happily married for 50 years, until Hassan, his father died on the 22nd of October, 1992.
Zewail spent educating himself at the University of Alexandria by getting his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree before moving to the United Sates to finish his Doctorate (PhD) degree under his mentor, Robin Hochstrasser at the University of Pennsylvania. He did not move from Egypt to the United States alone because he had with him his wife whom he met while studying at the University of Alexandria. Ahmed then completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and they had their first born child. Together with his advisor, Charles B. Harris at the University of California, Berkeley, Zewail was able to complete a post-doctoral fellowship.

Early Career

After Zewail had some post doctorate activities and works at the University of California, Berkeley, he was granted a position as a faculty at Caltech in the year 1976, where he devoted his time and effort, since, and by the year 1990, he was chosen and awarded the first ever Linus Pauling Chair Professor in Chemical Physics. It was in 1982 that Ahmed Zewail was vested and became a naturalized resident of the United States.

Contributions to Science

Ahmed Zewail’s main work has been a pioneer and a leader on femtochemistry – an area of physical chemistry that studies the chemical reactions happening in just a matter of femtoseconds. With the use of a rapid technique of ultrafast laser (which consists of ultrashort laser flashes), it allows the chemical reactions’ descriptions on a very short span of time – too short to analyze the transition states in several chemical reactions.
His work was based and initially turned out into something with the question, how rapid did the energy inside a large molecule such as the naphthalene, restructure among the entire atomic motions? They had to create an apparatus containing a vacuum chamber for those molecules exuding from the collimated beam source at a supersonic speed. The real challenge would boil down to building an ultrafast laser to be utilized alongside the molecular beam.
The team desired to witness the different processes from birth to death of every molecule. In this particular experiment, the anthracene molecule was isolated. It was through this experiment that Zewail and his team identified the specific movements of molecules and the importance of coherence in each phase of the molecular system. It was proven that the movement of each molecule is coherent, because if not, it would not have been observed in the first place.
The outcome of Zewail team’s experiment showed the importance of consistency and its existence in multifaceted molecular systems. The result of consistency and coherence was important through the movement of the molecules. Even before, molecular coherence had never been observed not because of the deficiency in coherence, but due to the deficiency in proper probes. In the experiments on anthracene, energy and time resolutions were initiated and correlated.
While Zewail was continuing his studies on the redistributions of vibrational energy, he began new studies and works on more brief time resolutions for molecules showcasing diverse rational motions and chemical processes.
It was in the year 1999 that Zewail received a Nobel Prize – on which he became third to have won as an Egyptian national but first in the field of Science. He received many different awards and recognitions from his works and experiments. His accolades were awarded by renowned bodies of institutions and he even ended up receiving the Grand Collar of the Nile, which is Egypt’s highest honor.
Zewail’s dedication to Science has led to political work. Like his father, he entered working for the government. He used Science as his driving force and platform to saving Egypt and saving the world. During the 4th of July, 2009 speech held at Cairo University, the president of the United States Barack Obama announced to the public the new program on Science Envoy as part of the fresh start between the people from the United States and the Muslims all over the world. And on January the following year, Bruce Alberts, Elias Zerhouni, and Ahmed Zewail became the first ever Science emissaries to Islam. They were tasked to visit countries with Muslims as the majority population beginning from the corners of North Africa to the boundaries of Southeast Asia.
Because of his accolades and great achievements in Science and even in political aspects, he was rumored to run for the presidential election of Egypt in 2011 but he justified himself by telling everybody that he had no political agenda or ambitions. All he wanted was to serve Egypt using Science as his armor and frankly voiced out that he strongly chose to die as a scientist and nothing else.
And then the highlight of his undying academic career came – Ahmed Zewail has been nominated and will partake in the PCAST or the Presidential Council of Advisors in Science and Technology presented and created by President Barack Obama. This is an advisory group of the country’s pioneer and leading engineers and scientists to make relatively significant pieces of advice for the President and Vice President and put together guidelines in the areas of Science, technology, and invention or innovation.

Agnes Arber

Agnes Robertson Arber was a British plant anatomist and morphologist, a Biology philosopher, and a Botany historian. Though born in London, the 51 years of her life was spent in Cambridge. Anger Arber was recognized to be the first woman botanist and the third overall to have been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 67. Because of her contributions to botanical science, Arber received the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society of London by the age of 69 – the first woman to receive such accolade.
In terms of her scientific research, it was focused on the monocotyledon class of flowering plants. During the beginning of the 20^th century, she contributed to the development of morphological research and studies in Botany. The later part of her life and works was concentrated on the Botany philosophy topic, specifically on the nature of biological research.

Personal Life and Education

On February 23, 1879, Agnes Arber was born in London. She had three other siblings (who also made big names for themselves), but is the first child of her parents, Henry Robertson and Agnes Lucy Turner. Her father, being an artist, was her first art instructor during her childhood, which she later took advantage from to exemplify her own scientific publications.
Arber began attending school by the age of eight at Northern London Collegiate School founded and run by one of the principal proponents for girls’ learning and education, Frances Buss. Her fascination with Botany developed under the supervision of Miss Edith Aitken Arber, her science teacher. This fascination has led her to publish her first research piece in 1894 on their school magazine. During her schools’ botany exams, she notched the top and won a scholarship. It was during this time that Arber got to meet Ethel Sargent, a plant morphologist who regularly gave presentations to the science club in their school. Sargent had caused a deep influence on Arber on research methods and interests when she became her mentor and colleague at the same time.
In 1909, Arber moved back to Cambridge after she married Edward Alexander Newall Arber, a paleobotanist. They were blessed with their only child who was born in 1913, Muriel Agnes Arber. Since both of them shared almost the same interests, the marriage was considered happy until 1918 when Newall Arber died after a period of ill health. Agnes Arber never got married again; instead, she drowned most of her time on her researches. At the back of her house was a small laboratory, which she used to work on until in 1940 that she shifted to philosophical study. She died at the age of 81 on March 22, 1960.

Early Career

Before Arber attended the University College in London, she spent the summer of 1897 collaborating with Ethel Sargent in her private laboratory. It was Sargent who gave her microtechniques used in preparing plant specimens during microscopic exams. While studying, Arber would return to work at least once at Sargent’s laboratory. Between the years 1902 and 1903, Arber became Sargent’s research assistant focusing work on seedling structures and it was during 1903 that she was able to publish her first paper about the anatomy of Macrozamia heteromera. While in the University, Arber also conducted studies on the gymnosperm class of plants, which made her produced various papers on their anatomy and morphology. The study and philosophy the morphology of plant had then become the core focus of her later work.
In the year 1909, Arber was able to earn a space through Newnham College in Balfour Laboratory for Women. Until the laboratory’s closure in 1927, she spent her life in that laboratory continuing her studies and making new ones.

Contributions to Science

Arber studied the connection between the emergence and the development of Botany following the natural history with plants’ evolution in terms of their descriptions, identifications, and classifications. It was then that she was able to publish her first book entitled “Herbals, their origin and evolution” just after she received the Research Fellowship award given by Newnham College in 1912.
With a lot of different researches and studies she had started and continued, Arber found a core topic to focus her research into – the morphology and anatomy of the monocot type and group of plants, which was inspired by her colleague and mentor Ethel Sargent. It was then in 1920 that she became an author of two books and other 94 various publications. Arber also made a comparative research on aquatic plants through exploring their morphologic differences. This led her to publish her second book in 1920 – Water Plants: A Study of Aquatic Angiosperms.
Five years later after she published her second book, she worked so hard to publish her third book called The Monocotyledons. It was a continuous study on the morphological methods of the analysis she presented in her book Water Plants.
After Balfour Laboratory’s closure and after she was neglected by the space she used to have at her School, Arber’s research and studies did not stop her to build her own small laboratory at her house’s back room. There, she applied the lessons she learned on private research from her previous mentors.
After the publication of her third book, Arber concentrated her research to the Gramineae group of plants, especially bamboo, grasses, and cereals. This focus has resulted to the publication of her last book that concerned about plant morphology, The Gramineae. The book featured the life cycles, reproductive and embryologic, and vegetative cycles of bamboo, grasses, and cereals with the use of comparative anatomical scrutiny and exploration of these plants.
In January 1942, Arber was able to publish her final paper concerning original botanical research. Her entire succeeding publications were then about philosophical and historical topics when she found it difficult to maintain her small laboratory during the World War II. Despite stopping from laboratory works, she published more and more papers on her philosophical studies and worked with different people as influences until she published her final book in 1957, The Manifold and the One that concerned her wider views and philosophical questions about the “Unity” of all things.

Adalbert Czerny

There are many different branches of medicine, and pediatrics is one of them. Adalbert Czerny made his name in science by also being known as one of the co-founders of modern pediatrics. Because of his devotions and contributions to pediatrics, several children’s diseases have even been named after him to commemorate his efforts in this branch of medicine.

Early Life and Educational Background

Adalbert Czerny was born on March 25, 1863 in Jaworzno, Poland but he grew up in Vienna. He was the son of a railway engineer and in 1879, the moved to Pilsen.
He already had an inclination for medicine, and when he passed his Abitur exam in 1882, he then decided to pursue medical studies at the Charles University which was in Prague. Six years later, he was able to graduate with his doctoral degree. He completed his doctoral studies by having a thesis which focused on kidney disease. To gain experience, Czerny worked as the clinical assistant of Alois Epstein who was working at the “Findelanstalt” or the hospital for foundlings. This was a part of the Prague University Hospital.

In 1893, he had a lecture about the nutrition of newborns as well as the treatise on glycogen and amaloid disorder. Because of these works of his, he was given two offers to become the chair of pediatrics in Breslau and Innsbruck. He decided to go for Breslau and it was there where he worked until the year 1910. While he was working in Breslau, an offer from Munich came, giving him the chance to be the full professor of pediatrics. Czerny declined this offer and because of his loyalty, he was given the position of being a personal full professor at Breslau, and it also came with a good raise in his salary.
In 1910, he had a career change which made him leave Breslau. He was offered the position of the being the chair of pediatrics in Strassburg’s new Children’s Hospital. It was there where he worked for three years. In 1913, he became Otto Heubner’s successor as the full professor for pediatrics. This was at the Berlin Charite. He worked at the Berlin Charite for 19 years and there he had much of his achievements. He even was given the chance to start the international School of Pediatrics.
During 1934-1936, he was the professor emeritus and the chair of pediatrics in Dusseldorf’s Medical Academy, and he was also the temporary head of their local Children’s Hospital. His years were spent in the field of pediatrics from the moment he finished his education.

Career Achievements

Czerny founded his own school, and it was primarily concerned with the metabolic pathology, nutrition physiology of neonates. While he was working the Children’s Hospital in Berlin University, he continued his research concerning infant mortality. It was something which Otto Heubner had started and Czerny built on the foundations which have been established.
He had his extensive work done in Breslau and along with his colleague and pupil named Arthur Keller, he was able to summarize the results he had from his Breslau work in the two-volume “Des Kindes Ernährung, Ernährungsstörungen und Ernährungstherapie”manual which translates to Children’s nutrition, nutritional disturbance and therapeutic nutrition. Because of the long name, it is most commonly referred to by the experts as simply “Czerny-Keller.” The initial edition was published in 1906, and other editions of this work was published later on in 1917 and 1928.
The “Czerny-Keller” manual basically determined facts about nutrition in the field of pediatrics and because of its significant findings, it has influenced the disciplines of pediatrics which are still being used today. Czerny used the phrase “disorder of nutrition” and this showed how nutrition as well as disease are related to each other and how they affect infant health.
He also distinguished three different groups of damages which are caused by nutrition, caused by infections, and those caused by physical constitutions. Another emphasis on his work was how nutritional disturbance affects the child’s behavior. He also had the “Der Arzt als Erzieher” or “The physician as an educator” which shows this kind of approach on the title itself.
Because of his contributions, Czerny has his own award which is annualy given by the German Association of Children’s and Juvenile Medicine or the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendmedizin. This award began in 1963, and is given yearly to deserving individuals who have had their own contributions or exemplary scientific achievements where pediatrics is concerned. The German Association of Children’s and Juvenile Medicine was founded in 1883, and they began the Adalbert-Czerny award in 1963 which is also the 100th anniversary which commemorates Czerny’s birth

Personal Life, Later Years, and Legacy

Czerny had his family and he has one son named Marianus. His son happened to be one of the full professors in Frankfurt for experimental physics—he taught from 1938 to 1961. He died in Berlin on the third of October, 1941 and was laid to rest in Pilsen.
He had been the discoverer of different scientific bases in pediatrics, and because of this, some children’s diseases are named after him. The most common ones are nutritional anemia observed in neonates which is called Czerny anemia, paradoxical respiration or what is known as Czerny respiration, and lymphatic-exudative diathesis which is also known as Czerny diathesis. Czerny diathesis happens to be a kind of clinical entity and Czerny himself distinguished this from scrofula and later on from tuberculosis as well. This was what Czery described as the individual disposition to the increased sensitivity of the skin as well as mucus. These were all named after Czerny to remember the contributions he helped make in defining the clinical symptoms of these specific pediatric conditions.
Just recently, Adalbert Czerny’s 105th birthday was remembered by one of the Google Doodles. It was the Google Doodle for March 25, 2013, and it featured a boy sitting on a high chair while Czerny who was in a standing position examined the young patient using a stethoscope.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace is a metaphysician, analyst, and the founder of scientific computing, and described what she did as “poetical science”.
Also known as the “Enchantress of Numbers”, her passion and contributions have served as inspiration to modern women around the world.

Life and Education

Born Augusta Ada Byron in London on December 10, 1815, she was the daughter the well-known romantic poet Lord George Byron and Anne Isabella “Annabella” Milbanke. Their marriage was brief and Lord Byron left shortly after Ada was born. English law stated that the father is granted full custody of children in the event of separation, but he did not show any interest in exercising his parental rights. He left England and died in Greece in 1823 when Ada was just 8 years old, never seeing his daughter again. Ada on the other hand, was not allowed to even view a portrait of her father until she turned twenty.
Annabella did not want her to end up as a poet like her father, as she could not bear that unpredictable nature that Lord Byron had. She was slightly distant to her child and would often leave Ada with Hon. Lady Milbanke, who spoiled her grandchild. However, she kept up with the appearance of being a loving mother because it was what society expected of her. In fact, Annabella frequently sent letters to Lady Milbanke asking about how Ada was doing in case she would eventually need evidence that she deeply cared about her child.
Ada was a sickly child, and would often have terrible bouts of headache. She suffered from measles and was left paralyzed, and was under bed rest for almost a year. She regained to ability to walk in 1831, with the help of crutches.
Ada was exposed to rigorous tutoring in logic, Mathematics and science, and Ada’s inclination towards complex things became apparent when she came up with a design for a flying machine in 1828, when she was just 13 years old. She also created different designs for boats, and would endlessly look at diagram after diagram of new inventions from the Industrial Revolution that were published in all the scientific magazines she could find. Her great exposure to Mathematics formed the person she was to become and prepared her for the contributions she was to give to the modern world.
Ada married an aristocrat, William King, in 1835 when she was 19 years old. King was ten years her senior. After three years, King inherited a noble title, making them the Earl and Countess of Lovelace. This was how she became known as Ada Lovelace, instead of Lady Ada King. They had three children together, but their family and fortune was still greatly influenced by Ada’s mother, Lady Byron. King accepted Lady Byron’s domineering personality and rarely opposed her decisions.
Lady Byron took on William Benjamin Carpenter to serve as a tutor for King and Ada’s children. However, he fell in love with Ada and continued to pursue her despite the circumstances. Ada was not comfortable about this and cut off any communication with him.

Notable Contributions and Works

It was an era where noblewomen were not expected nor encouraged to be intellectual. Still, Ada continued to pursue her passion for numbers and logic.
Ada developed a strong respect for her tutor, Mary Sommerville, and they continued corresponding for years. She was also acquaintances with other intellectuals like Andrew Crosse, Charles Wheatstone, and Charles Dickens.
In 1883, she met Charles Babbage through Mary Sommerville. He was a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in Cambridge. This meeting would later on prove to grow into a lifelong friendship, as their mutual interests became the source of their constant correspondence. They would talk about their theories, beliefs, and visions, and she was left fascinated by the work that Babbage did. Charles Babbage was the one who initially called her as the “Enchantress of Numbers”.
Charles Babbage has already gained popularity at that time, and had previously been working on a Difference Engine, a machine that would have the ability to compute for polynomials by using the differences method. Because of a number of personal tragedies and continued disagreements between him and his chief engineer, Joseph Clement, Babbage’s frustrations about the whole project became evident and the government ceased its support for the project in 1842. This paved the way for him to concentrate on a calculating machine, and Analytical Engine.
Although the plans for this project had been drawn in 1834, the government refused to fund it because of the unfinished Difference Engine. However, this project earned interest from abroad. The Italian Mathematician Louis Menebrea discussed the Analytical Engine in a French memoir in 1842. This was where Ada proved to be most useful for Babbage. She was hired to translate the memoir from French to English. Ada worked on the memoir non-stop, working on it within a nine month period from 1842 to 1843. She also added her own notes to the translated memoir, which later on became critical in the work of Alan Turing, Father of Theoretical Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence as he worked on building the first modern computers during the 1940’s. These notes were seen as the first set of algorithms that were to be followed by a machine. They were longer than the memoir itself, and explained in great detail how the Analytical Engine differed from the Difference Engine. And though Babbage and a lot of other people in the same field concentrated merely on a computer’s capacity for calculating and number crunching, Ada believed in the vision that a computer can do so much more than that.
Ada Lovelace died at the early age of 36 in 1852 due to uterine cancer. Before she died, her husband abandoned her after she was rumored to have confessed to an affair. She was buried at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham beside her father as per her request, because her interest in him never subsided despite never having met him.

Abu Nasr Al-Farabi

Abu Nasr Muhammad al- Farabi, one the earliest Islamic intellectuals who were instrumental in transmitting the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle to the Muslim world, had a considerable influence on the later Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna.
He was an outstanding linguist who translated the Greek works on Aristotle and Plato and made a considerable additions to them of his own.
He earned the nickname Mallim-e-Sani, which is translated as “second master” or “second teacher”.

Early Life:

Al-Farabi completed his earlier education at Farab and Bukhara but, later on, he went to Baghdad for higher studies, where he studied and worked for a long time. During this period he acquired mastery over several languages as well as various branches of knowledge and technology. Farabi contributed considerably to science, philosophy, logic, sociology, medicine, mathematics and music, but the major ones are in philosophy, logic and sociology and for which he stands out as an Encyclopedist.

Contributions and Achievements:

As a philosopher, Farabi was the first to separate philosophy from theology. It is difficult to find a philosopher both in Muslim and Christian world from Middle Ages onwards who has not been influenced by his views. He believed in a Supreme Being who had created the world through the exercise of balanced intelligence. He also asserted this same rational faculty to be the sole part of the human being that is immortal, and thus he set as the paramount human goal the development of that rational faculty. He considerably gave more attention to political theory as compared to any Islamic philosopher.
Later in his work, Al-Farabi laid down in Platonic fashion the qualities necessary for the ruler, he should be inclined to rule by good quality of a native character and exhibit the right attitude for such rule. At the heart of Al-Farabi’s political philosophy is the concept of happiness in which people cooperate to gain contentment. He followed the Greek example and the highest rank of happiness was allocated to his ideal sovereign whose soul was ‘united as it were with the Active Intellect’. Therefore Farabi served as a tremendous source of aspiration for intellectuals of the middle ages and made enormous contributions to the knowledge of his day, paving the way for the later philosopher and thinkers of the Muslim world.
Farabian epistemology has both a Neoplatonic and an Aristotelian dimension. The best source for al-Farabi’s classification of knowledge is his Kitab ihsa al-ulum. This work neatly illustrates Al-Farabi’s beliefs, both esoteric and exoteric. Through all of them runs a primary Aristotelian stress on the importance of knowledge. Thus al-Farabi’s epistemology, from what has been described may be said to be encyclopedic in range and complex in articulation, using both a Neoplatonic and an Aristotelian voice.
Farabi also participated in writing books on early Muslim sociology and a notable book on music titled Kitab al-Musiqa (The Book of Music) which is in reality a study of the theory of Persian music of his day, although in the West it has been introduced as a book on Arab music. He invented several musical instruments, besides contributing to the knowledge of musical notes. It has been reported that he could play his instrument so well as to make people laugh or weep at will. Al-Farabi’s treatise Meanings of the Intellect dealt with music therapy, where he discussed the therapeutic effects of music on the soul.

Later Life:

Farabi traveled to many distant lands throughout his life and gained many experiences a lot, due to which he made so many contributions for which he is still remembered and acknowledged. Inspite of facing many hardships, he worked with full dedication and made his name among the popular scientists of history. He died a bachelor in Damascus in 339 A.H. /950 A.D. at the age of 80 years.

Abdul Qadeer Khan

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan is a famous Pakistani nuclear scientist and a metallurgical engineer. He is widely regarded as the founder of gas-centrifuge enrichment technology for Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent program. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program is a source of extreme national pride. As its “father”, A.Q. Khan, who headed Pakistan’s nuclear program for some 25 years, is considered a national hero.

Early life and Career:

Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in 1936 in Bhopal, India. He immigrated with his family to Pakistan in 1947. After studying at St. Anthony’s High School, Khan joined the D. J. Science College of Karachi, where he took physics and mathematics. His teacher at the college was famous solar physicist Dr. Bashir Syed. Khan earned a B.Sc. degree in physical metallurgy at the University of Karachi in 1960.
Khan accepted a job as an inspector of weight and measures in Karachi after graduation. He later resigned and went to work in Netherlands in the 1970’s. Khan gained fame as a talented scientist at the nuclear plant he worked in. He had special access to the most restricted areas of the URENCO facility. He could also read the secret documentation on the gas centrifuge technology.
In December, 1974, he came back to Pakistan and tried to convince Bhutto to adopt his Uranium route rather than Plutonium route in building nuclear weapons. According to the media reports, A.Q. Khan had a close and cordial relationship with President General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq and the Military of Pakistan. He also maintained a close relationship with the Pakistan Air Force.
After his role in Pakistan’s nuclear program, Khan re-organized the Pakistani’s national space agency, SUPARCO. In the late of 1990s, Khan played an important role in Pakistan’s space program, patricularly the Pakistan’s first Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) project and the Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV). Khan’s unrestricted publicity of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities brought humiliation to the Pakistan’s government. The United States began to think that Pakistan was giving nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, to get ballistic missile technology in exchange. Khan also came under renewed scrutiny following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. He allegedly sold nuclear technology to Iran. However, he was pardoned in 2004, but placed under house arrest.
On the 22nd of August 2006, the Pakistani government declared that Khan had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was undergoing treatment. He was released from house arrest in Februray 2009.

Other Contributions:

Khan was also a key figure in the establishment of several engineering universities in Pakistan. He set up a metallurgy and material science institute in Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology. The place, where Khan served as both executive member and director, has been named as Dr. A. Q. Khan Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Material Sciences. Another school, Dr. A. Q. Khan Institute of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering at Karachi University, has also been named in his honor. Khan thus played a vital role in bringing metallurgical engineering courses in various universities of Pakistan.
Despite his international image, Khan remains widely popular among in Pakistanis and he is considered domestically to be one of the most-influential and respected scientists in Pakistan.