The most poignant and humbling moment for Dr Attaur Rehman, the former chairman of the Higher Education Commission, was when, using a feather pen, he put his signature on an old parchment of a 350-year-old book.
The book he signed belongs to the Royal Society of London, which, Rehman said proudly, “[also] has the signatures of Charles Darwin and Sir Isaac Newton.” The memory he recalled was from July 14, 2006.
A replica of the book, which Dr Rehman was given as a memoir, is currently placed in the library of the HEJ Research Institute of Chemistry, ICCBS University of Karachi. Dr Attaur Rehman is the patron of the International Centre of Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS), which comprises a number of institutes, including the Hussein Ebrahim Jamal Research Institute of Chemistry and the Dr Panjwani Centre of Molecular Medicine and Drug Development at Karachi University.
The copied pages of the ancient parchment show signatures of several prominent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth, who, together as a society, have a long track record of providing scientific advice to policy makers.
Science has been closely intertwined with the Royal Society since 1660. In the 350 years since it was founded, the society’s Fellows have given us gravity, evolution, the electron, the double helix, the internet and a large part of the modern world, boasts the society on its website.
Dr Attaur Rahman feels that, as a scientist, the real honour is when you are recognised and awarded by fellow researchers. “I did not feel as happy when I got the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, Sitara-e-Imtiaz, Hilal-e-Imtiaz or even the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, because these are national honors. The best moment of my life was when I signed the original parchment,” he said.
Dr Atta is the only Pakistani to have attained the honour for his work in Chemical research. Talking to The Express Tribune, he said that his key contribution is the discovery of anti-cancer drugs in the leaves of a local flower sadabahar. Besides this, he has also contributed in the areas of alkaloids in chemistry, Leishmania disease of the skin and visceral organs found in Africa, Asia and Sindh in Pakistan. Besides this, he has over 825 publications in leading international journals in several fields of organic chemistry.
Till 2006, he was the fourth person from the Islamic world and the only to have actually carried out research in the Islamic world to receive this honour. Before him, Professor Salimuzzaman Siddiqui was honored with the fellowship on his work in India in 1961, Professor Dr Abdus Salam in 1959 for his work in physics, and Professor Mohammad Akhtar in 1980 for his work carried out in the UK.
He recalls that being the only child of an industrialist father, he had to convince him to be allowed to join Cambridge University in UK instead of taking up the family business. “I did not want to just make money, I wanted to research,” he said.
When he completed his PhD in 1968 from Cambridge, he was immediately elected as a Don, a fellow or tutor of a college or university, especially of traditional collegiate universities such as Oxford and Cambridge in England, where he disproved the research of a Nobel laureate, Sir Robert Robinson.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 29th, 2010.
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