6 Dec 2024 | Iran, News and features, Volume 53.03 Autumn 2024
Iran, a country that in its distant past played a significant role in the development of knowledge and laid the foundations upon which modern science now stands, has experienced a tremendous urge for scientific rebirth over the past century.
But Iranian scientists are facing a government that considers itself the manifestation of God’s will on Earth, that has no qualms about intimidation and oppression, and whose daily rhetoric revolves around the word “enemy”.
It wants its ideological model to be seen as the path to success and is terrified of criticism, quickly making everything from nuclear energy and the space industry to vaccination and public medical services into a security issue.
It may be no surprise that Iran’s nuclear programme is now securitised, and that the Supreme National Security Council demands silence or compliance from science and media institutions. The tool of national security has now become a pressure point in Iran for any thought that does not align with the government’s ideology.
I have covered science and technology news in Iran for more than 10 years. Although I’ve dealt with issues that were considered red lines on multiple occasions, the only time my colleagues and I received a death threat was when I published a story about the importance of blood transfusion and rejected the unscientific and dangerous practice of hijamat (cupping therapy – a form of Islamic traditional medicine). But that incident is in no way comparable to the deadly consequences of censorship that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.
When the pandemic was claiming lives, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei, banned the entry of vaccines from the USA and the UK into Iran. This was a decision that cost many lives.
The reaction of domestic media to this decision was silence under censorship, and when foreign media reacted they were accused of being agents of the enemy.
“You won’t find even one media outlet asking what the consequences of the leader’s decision were in this regard,” said one doctor and medical science activist, who asked to remain anonymous.
“Even Dr [Masoud] Pezeshkian, who is himself a physician, at that time – before his presidential election – when asked about the vaccine, said we didn’t want to import vaccines from certain countries based on our policy, although he was surely aware of the effects of this decision.”
While Iranian-made vaccines had not yet received their controversial approval, and parts of the Food and Drug Agency in the Ministry of Health were trying to enforce minimal oversight, the Ministry of Intelligence accused three scientists and managers of co-operating with the enemy and obstructing the approval of the vaccine.
It requested that the judiciary prosecute them.
Correspondence showing this was revealed only in a set of documents published by a hacker group called Ali’s Justice after it gained access to Iran’s judiciary.
In this correspondence, it was mentioned that, due to the matter’s sensitivity, the case should be investigated without informing the public or arresting the individuals. A few days later, the Barakat vaccine was approved in Iran.
Pressuring individuals active in scientific fields has a long history in Iran.
After the protests following the 2009 presidential election results, known as the Green Movement, several professors who supported them were expelled from universities. There were similar incidents after the events of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
In late January 2018, the intelligence agency of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrested several environmental activists involved in a project to save the endangered Asiatic cheetah. The Tehran prosecutor accused them of espionage.
But a panel including ministers of justice and lawyers announced that they had found no evidence of espionage. Even the Ministry of Intelligence stated that it had no evidence to support the charges.
One of those arrested was conservationist Kavous Seyed-Emami, a Canadian citizen. Two weeks after his arrest, prison authorities informed his family that he had killed himself.
However, his family believe that his death was due to physical injuries resulting from torture in prison, and signs of beating were visible on his body.
Another detainee was forced to confess on state television, and others served their sentences in full. Finally, after enduring six years of imprisonment without any evidence of the reasons for their arrest, the remaining detainees were released in April as part of a pardon.
Blocking the flow of information
One of the methods researchers used during the pandemic to estimate the actual mortality rate from Covid-19 and expose the discrepancies in official statistics was to refer to the monthly birth and death statistics published by the National Organisation for Civil Registration.
Mahan Ghafari, a virology specialist at the University of Oxford who followed this issue, told Index how, after the reports were published, the organisation restricted and stopped publishing this data. Eventually, access to the organisation’s website was blocked for those outside Iran.
Another part of this pressure involves halting international collaborations. Ghafari recalls how, after a paper was published with an Israeli co-author, the Iranian regime accused all the scientific findings of being a plan against Iran by Israel.
Scientists working on Iran-related issues from outside the country face the risk of harassment. Even their travel to Iran and visiting their families is affected, so many prefer to stay silent.
In the wave of arrests of environmental activists, Kaveh Madani, who at the time was the deputy for education and research at the Department of Environment, was also arrested. He repeatedly spoke about security interrogations and the review of his communications by security agencies.
Although the official reason for his arrest was not announced, his explicit warnings about Iran’s water bankruptcy and the impending water crisis were widely considered to be a driving factor.
Madani later left Iran and was appointed as the director of the UN think-tank on water.
The story of Madani’s arrest is often cited as a cautionary tale. When globally recognised Iranian experts return to help improve the situation in Iran, they not only have to battle the complex bureaucracy of the political structure but also face unaccountable political entities. They risk interrogation, arrest, imprisonment and even death. This situation only exacerbates the self-censorship among Iranian scientists living abroad.
An Iranian-American researcher currently working in cosmology, who asked not to be named, told Index about another aspect of structural censorship and the pressures it creates.
“I would love to do things alongside my professional work that bring science into people’s homes – lectures, talks with the media, sharing my experiences. However, due to the fear of being targeted by political groups inside the country and the limitation on my ability to travel to Iran, I have completely stopped these activities. This fear halted great opportunities that could have been used to promote science and help Iran’s scientific development,” they said.
They also pointed out how Iranian scientists outside the country faced dual pressures. While the security environment and censorship prevent them from criticising a scientific project in Iran, they are deprived of many research opportunities elsewhere because of their Iranian background.
Their funding is sometimes denied if they have dual nationality, and they face more difficulties in advancing in the scientific community of their host country.
Powerful but chaotic censorship
When protests over the killing of Mahsa (Jina) Amini sparked the flames of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, students and academic institutions were not spared from the assault. Not only were students attacked and suppressed, professors who raised their voices in support of them were also repressed.
Encieh Erfani, an assistant professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences in Iran, resigned in 2022 in protest against the regime’s treatment of students and is now continuing her scientific activities outside the country. She told Index about the wider issues.
“The problem here is that the censorship structure has red lines that you know exist and, from experience, you know you should not even come close to them,” she said.
What Erfani points to is one of the most significant reasons for the intensification of self-censorship in Iran. The fear of unknowingly crossing red lines leads to conservatism in the scientific community – a community that can grow only by pushing existing boundaries.
Kiarash Aramesh, director of the Pennsylvania Western University’s James F Drane Bioethics Institute, which focuses on biomedical sciences and the humane treatment of patients, agrees. He recently published a book on pseudoscience in medicine in Iran.
“As long as you don’t oppose the principles of Islamic traditional medicine, you can publish your articles. But the scientific institution in Iran is so influenced by politics that even within the scientific community there will be opposition to you,” he said.
Beyond slowing down the process of scientific development, censorship in Iran is creating a corrupt environment from which anti-scientific and pseudoscientific trends emerge and thrive.
“When there is corruption in society, there is also corruption within the scientific community. Contrary to popular belief that scientists are always pure and honest people, they, too, are subject to this corruption. Under the conditions of a totalitarian regime, in the absence of transparency and freedom of criticism, even scientists may engage in unethical behaviours and participate in corruption for personal gain. Just as we have seen in history, this story repeats itself,” Erfani said.
Censorship in science in Iran is a many-faced monster that, on the one hand, forces scientists within the country into conservatism and, on the other hand, tries to ideologise the structure of science through threats and intimidation.
It has discouraged and prevented many Iranian scientists abroad from participating in scientific discourse and contributing to its development in Iran. It restricts international collaboration between Iranian and non-Iranian scientists and it creates a dark space for the growth of corruption – a situation exacerbated by the repression and threats against science media and free scientific journalism.
24 Oct 2024 | News and features, Volume 53.03 Autumn 2024
Lisa Jones-Engel never envisioned being thrown out of a conference hours before she was due to give a keynote speech. But that’s exactly what happened when she told the organisers of an event for scientists involved in animal testing about her new role with the non-profit People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta).
The first reaction to her announcement had been “Maybe don’t come to dinner with us tonight in case anyone asks what you’re doing,” along with an instruction to remove the Peta reference from the cover slide of her presentation. All the other slides were approved.
Jones-Engel is a former primate scientist who spent years running tests on monkeys and is now working to eradicate the use of primates in biomedical research, but she was not there to talk about her work with Peta.
With her keynote due at 9am, she got a text at around 7.15am asking her to meet the organisers downstairs.
“There’s the three of them plus the chair, and then they said, ‘Leadership has decided that you can’t do this,’” she told Index. They took her security badge.
Jones-Engel thought there had been a mistake. She was a senior scientist. She’d given this exact talk before on international stages. Holding in the tears, she took the lift back to her room. Within minutes, there was a knock at the door.
“They’re confused. They’re coming here to say they’re sorry,” she remembers thinking. Instead, it was security, there to escort her out of the hotel.
“I’ve basically just been cast out as a scientist, as far as I can tell,” she said. “What the industry did that day was to guarantee that they had just solidified who I am and who I was going to be.”
Bias in the lab
A number of scientists told Index that they were being refused funding or publication if they questioned the validity of animal-based methods, and that association with animal advocacy groups made them toxic in the world of academia. They claim others are afraid to speak up.
Some of these scientists are part of the Coalition to Illuminate and Address Animal Methods Bias (COLAAB), an international coalition of researchers and advocates addressing a crucial issue: that animal methods are still considered a necessity within medical testing, even when better science is available.
Emily Trunnell, a USA-based neuroscientist, is part of the coalition and the director of Peta’s Science Advancement and Outreach division.
“What we are interested in is when scientists who use only non-animal methods either submit manuscripts or submit grant applications, and are asked by the reviewers to add in an animal test to a study that’s otherwise completely non-animal or are rejected because they didn’t include an animal test,” she explained. “What ends up happening is that the true value of these non-animal methods becomes suppressed.”
Until recently, this phenomenon was anecdotal but a survey by scientists including Catharine Krebs, who leads Colaab, now shows the scale of the problem. Out of 90 survey respondents, 31 had been asked by peer reviewers to add animal experiments to their non-animal studies. Survey respondents came from around the world.
“You cannot validate non-animal methods using animals – that’s just not scientific,” said Frances Cheng, chief scientist in the Laboratory Investigations Department at Peta, explaining that animal data was being valued more than data based on human physiology.
Charu Chandrasekera was an animal researcher until two things drove her to change: the ethical implications, and “realising firsthand the colossal limitations of animal research”.
She explained that scientists could reduce animal testing drastically with already available technology, and she demonstrated this by showing Index an organ-on-a-chip, which simulates the responses of a human organ.
Now, she is the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods at the University of Windsor, which promotes human biology-based tests. But when she was trying to establish a centre for alternatives, the response she got from the dean of science at one university was: “You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t want to offend the animal researchers here.”
She told Index there was a culture within the scientific community that disregarded human data as anecdotal, and required that scientists validated human data with animal models.
“The system is set up in a way that you can’t really fight it if you want to have a career in academia,” she said. “You have to publish or perish. You depend on these funding agencies to give you the money, and they’re requesting animal data.”
Chandrasekera has experienced this bias herself. When she applied for a grant to develop a 3D bio-printed human lung tissue model, one of the biggest criticisms from the peer review was a lack of animal data.
“And guess what I did? I said, ‘Keep your money!’” She went on to secure private funding, but she added: “Not everyone has the means to fight against the system.”
She knows scientists who support animal-free methods but stay silent. They are worried about the implications when they sit in front of grant review panels and journal editorial boards.
Dismissing activists
Jones-Engel said there was a group of scientists who functioned as activists and received silencing treatments like she did before her cancelled keynote speech.
“It seems that in other disciplines we accept scientist activists. We accept climate scientists who are activists. We accept physicians who advocate for their patients, who are activists about maternal rights. But within the animal research community, that is somehow considered anathema,” she said.
She has seen colleagues choosing not to speak up about the use of primates in laboratories because they don’t want to be seen as activists.
When Cheng questioned the use of animals during her training, she was not trying to highlight animal cruelty but rather that the methods were unscientific, with animal biology not translating to human biology. When she wrote a line in the dedication of her thesis apologising to the animals she’d unnecessarily killed, her supervisor told her to remove it, as it would lower her chance of graduation. She was told her job was to graduate, not to think about animal cruelty and translatability. Now, Cheng keeps a tally of all the animals she’s saved compared with the ones she’s killed, so that she can see on paper that the results are net positive.
Once she’d graduated, she knew she did not want to work in the animal testing industry, and she volunteered at a hospital doing clinical research. The role of co-ordinator of clinical trials became available, and her supervisor was supportive of her application. She waited for a response, and then she received an email from her supervisor, asking her to join him on a walk in the woods, away from monitored communications.
He’d been told by the second-in-command that they couldn’t hire Cheng because she was an animal rights activist.
“At that time, I really wasn’t,” she said. “I think the only thing that was public was a photo that people took of me at a circus protest, and it was on my Facebook account, and it was set private, so the only way that they would know is if they’d hacked into my account somehow.”
The second-in-command went on to tell her supervisor: “You know we do animal research, right?”
More recently, Cheng tried to submit a science-based commentary on issues with using mice and rats for human nutrition research but was rejected by the reviewers because of her affiliation with Peta.
For Trunnell, when deciding whether to accept the job at Peta, she said: “I felt like the decision I was making was whether or not I was OK with being blacklisted in science in order to pursue this goal.” Ultimately, she doesn’t feel that has happened, but she remembers the assumption within the animal research community that activists were blacklisted.
The monkey in the room
In 2022, Jones-Engel was part of a group of scientists who did an assessment for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on the long-tailed macaque, the most widely traded species used in laboratories, finding that the species which was once everywhere in Southeast Asia was now facing a dramatic decline.
The IUCN consequently moved the monkeys to “endangered” status. Since then, she said, there had been a move by the industry to dismiss the idea that the macaques were really disappearing.
The National Association for Biomedical Research, a US non-profit which calls itself the “national voice for animal research ”, submitted a petition to the IUCN against the listing.
Jones-Engel told Index: “I was personally attacked. A petition was written by the industry targeting me, another scientist and another activist saying that, even though we’re scientists, because we are advocating for the listing of those animals to be endangered that must mean this was all being driven by the animal rights community.”
The monkeys have remained on the endangered list, and Jones-Engel said that although CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) could have done more, they had kept the countries supplying macaques on a review list.
There is huge money behind animal research. Cheng explained that animal tests were often used to produce health claims for food and drink, and at the moment those tests were cheaper than clinical tests.
Jones-Engel added that for companies known for using or supplying animals, there was a fine balance if they wanted to move towards non-animal testing.
“How do you not spook your shareholders? How do you not scare your investors?” she said.
Chandrasekera said there was an entire industry which benefitted financially from animal testing, from selling mice to providing specialised instruments.
They have an interest in animal tests continuing.
There have been huge developments globally in phasing out chemical testing on animals, and there is a scientific community moving away from using animals in labs. But the larger percentage, Chandrasekera said, did not want to change or were scared to do so.
She makes a stark point. While these scientists are silenced, the advancement of medicine suffers. We do not have effective treatments for a huge number of diseases, and without the acceptance of better models that translate to human biology, that can’t change.
“Federal funding agencies and scientific journals of the 21st century must stop acting like the Catholic Church of the 15th century, which silenced and persecuted brilliant minds.”
2 Nov 2011 | Uncategorized
When science and free expression clash, it’s often a matter of public concern. The fallout from Professor David Nutt’s clash with the government was one of many topics tackled at a panel discussion at the British Academy on Monday night. As perhaps the most famous recent example of government rejection of scientific research, the furore over Professor Nutt’s findings about drug use exposed the disconnect between scientists’ presentation of data and government policy –– and, for those working in criminology, education or communications, the problems can be even greater.
The event, jointly organised by SAGE and the Academy, part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, presented the panel with the question: “How can social scientists and government work together to strengthen public trust in scientific evidence?”
For Julian Huppert MP, this was a chance to challenge the belief that politics and science simply don’t mix. Unhappy with the way in which some politicians have shied away from attempts to place the work of social scientists at the heart of some of their own decision-making, he applauded the Conservative manifesto pledge to encourage MPs to attend a course in understanding science. Unfortunately, only a handful of politicians took part — and those who amounted to “crisis cases” within politics were nowhere to be seen.
Professor Anthony Heath also had some complaining to do: lamenting the fact that social scientists rely too often on “stylised”facts and selective use of events. Social scientists need to be aware of the difference between advocacy research and scientific research, he added.
For Imperial College academic and Guardian contributor Dr Alice Bell, who contributed to research for the BBC Trust’s review of impartiality in science reporting, there is a real need for social scientists to have their findings challenged, acknowledged and debated, not only in Westminster, but in the public arena: for this, the media is crucial — and the work of PR professionals should not be discounted.
How scientists communicate –– and what is hidden –– is explored in the forthcoming issue of Index on Censorship magazine, Dark matter: What’s science got to hide? The issue, published by SAGE, looks at how scientific data is digested, politicised or suppressed — whether it be the work of doctors, physicists or oceanographers. Fred Pearce, author of The Climate Files, is an advocate for data sharing, calling for an openness in scientific communities, particularly on the heels of the Climategate scandal at the University of East Anglia. Sense about Science‘s Tracey Brown laments the increasing pressures on scientists and stepped up attempts to silence their debate, not least due to the chilling effect of English libel law. The BMJ’s investigative editor Deborah Cohen looks at how keeping information about drugs trials out of the public domain can have disastrous results — here some trusted names in the drugs business come under scrutiny.
Elsewhere, in the United States, warnings over the dangers of deepwater drilling go ignored in a political environment that has led President Obama to disappoint those who had hoped for a more transparent approach to research. The ACLU’s Heather Weaver outlines the beguiling trajectory of the powerful creationist lobby and its impact on the US education system. And in China, the pollution politics at play paints a worrying future for some of the country’s population.
The issue is out on 28 November, with a launch of the magazine at Imperial College on 6 December. For more information about The Art Issue, available now, and to subscribe to the magazine, click here.
