Content Gazette - December 2019 - 1

from a history of colonialism and slavery that continue to reverberate to this
day. Many African countries have only
gained independence as recently as the
mid 1950s. This dynamic was acknowledged by former U.S. President Barack
Obama in his speech to the people of
Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in July
2015, when he declared [6]: "So, too, here
in Africa. This is the cradle of humanity, and ancient African kingdoms were
home to great libraries and universities.
But the evil of slavery took root not only
abroad, but here on the continent. Colonialism skewed Africa's economy and
robbed people of their capacity to shape
their own destiny. Eventually, liberation
movements grew. And 50 years ago, in
a great burst of self-determination, Africans rejoiced as foreign flags came down
and your national flags went up."
We are talking about a proud continent, rich in history and also in potential.
According to the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), some of the economies
with the fastest rates of growth in the
world are actually located in Africa, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and others [7].
The difficulties that African universities face do not mean that impactful research is not happening in Africa.
There are many laudable and world-recognized efforts in various domains, especially in relation to fields of particular
significance to Africa including research
on HIV/AIDS, climate change, agriculture, and anthropology. For example,
Glenda Gray, a South African physician
known for her work on HIV research
and President of the South African
Medical Research Council, was named
in the 2017 TIME list of 100 most influential people in the world [8]. The
husband and wife professors Salim and
Quarraisha Abdool-Karim are awardwinning epidemiologists from South
Africa, widely recognized for their
work on infectious diseases. The husband is a member of the U.S. National
Academy of Medicine, while the wife is
a recipient of the 2016 L'Oreal-UNESCO
Award for Women in Science. In 2017,
she was also named by the BBC as one
of the seven trailblazing women in science; this list starts with Marie Curie [9]!
6

And if we go back a few decades earlier, we can mention the transformative
contribution by the South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard (1922-2001)
who performed the first successful heart
transplant in 1967. Interestingly, this is
how Barnard referred to his feat, "On
Saturday I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known, and on Monday
I was world renowned." How many lives
on a global scale have the works of these
various individuals saved?
There is no question that talent exists in abundance in Africa, especially
younger talent with the continent's
population accounting for the youngest
median age in the world at 19.7 years
according to Wikipedia. But talent this
young needs to be nurtured. Given an
opportunity, they can grow, shine, and
compete at the highest levels. Examples
are many from within the continent and
also from outside.
Former U.S. President Obama's father was a Kenyan who traveled to the
United States to receive an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Hawaii and an M.A. degree
in economics from Harvard University
in the 1960s. It took only one generation
for the son to rise to the highest office
in the United States and leave a mark
on the world stage. Another prominent
public figure of African descent is the
former U.N. Chief Kofi Anan (1938-
2018) from Ghana, who studied in the
United States and Switzerland in the
early 1960s. He went on to share along
with the United Nations the 2001 Nobel
Peace Prize for their work "for a better
organized and more peaceful world."
On the science side, the South-African
American physicist Allan Cormack
(1924-1998) shared the 1979 Nobel
Prize in Medicine for his work on X-ray
CAT scans and was later awarded the
U.S. National Medal of Science in 1990.
He taught at Tufts University. Another
example is the 1999 Chemistry Nobel
Laureate Ahmed Zewail (1946-2016)
who emigrated from Egypt to the United States and taught at Caltech. He is
known as the "father of femtochemistry." This list of individuals is not meant
to be exhaustive in any way. They are
only meant to serve as examples, while
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acknowledging that many other prominent scientists and leaders exist across
other countries in the African continent.
Not to mention the long list of impactful
scientists and leaders of African-American heritage in the United States alone.
I am a believer in the power of diversity in science. In one of my earlier
editorials on the "blindness of science,"
I spoke about the value of diversity and
how it enriches the academic discourse
[10]. I am also a believer in the power
of education and how it can serve as a
bridge to empower people, improve
their conditions, and bring communities
closer together. Everyone wins from an
environment where education prevails,
and where science works hand in hand
to solve challenges that affect people regardless of their race, ethnicity, origin,
gender, or religion. We are all subject
to the consequences of climate change,
independent of where we live. The same
life-threatening diseases can mortally
wound us all; none of us is immune by
their geography or history.
For these reasons, educational and research institutions in the Western world
should do more to reach out to the African
continent. We cannot progress through
the 21st-century thinking of conquering
Mars and the stars while students in remote villages are only imagining what
computers look like! How many powerful and promising minds don't attain their
full potential due to lack of opportunity?
Today, when we face a computationally
challenging problem, we throw more
computing cores at it and launch our powerful supercomputers into full gear. But
brute force computing alone cannot solve
all problems. Many problems in science
require an injection of a higher dose of
creativity, and not of computations. The
human mind is the nuclear center of creativity in this universe, something that
machines, no matter how powerful or how
"intelligent" they are claimed to be, will
never match. We can assign more creativity to our problems by enlarging the pool
of thinkers around them.
There are many ways by which western institutions of higher education can
reach out to African educational institutions, including allocation of research
funding for joint projects, fellowship

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DECEMBER 2019

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Content Gazette - December 2019

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