Only one thousand years ago, the average life expectancy in the world was less than 27, today it can be as high as 87 and increasing. The quality of life was no better. The average vocabulary of a person was less than 1000 and included the daily items of use. An average person would see less than 1000 human faces before dying and had to work with out any holidays or any security for 18 hours a day to get by and so on…

Today it is different not because we have become any more different genetically than our ancestors but because we are living in a world while
95 percent of all scientists, researchers and technologists that have ever lived on earth are alive with us, generating knowledge and contributing to our lives in more ways than we are ever aware of. From cellphones and mobile computing to cancer fighting drugs and child educational psychology. And as many of us already know the most powerful and the best communities in the world are those which are at the forefront of knowledge generation and application.

Such communities and countries, whose socioeconomic system is based not on primitive bazars but sustainable knowledge generation and its adaption to their economy geared to improvement of life for everyone have one thing in common a scientific culture of a can-do attitude and an enormous cultural valuation for scientists and technologists. Unfortunately Iran is not one of them.

Problems are many but I would underline the major ones here, most of them have sociocultural roots (the single most important factor in Iran) rather political or economical:

1-Lack of cultural value and reward for scientists and their work. Iran today has a primitive culture based on primitive survival tactics, that has no place in it for advance science and technology. It is a consumer bazar without any production. A construction subcontractor has more social respect than a stem cell researcher. Basically the cultural parameters are such that the researcher is not taken seriously and is considered a modern day clown without any real implications for society while the subcontractor or for that matter the carpet merchant has a social standing as a serious member of the society. All this is due to the simplistic minds and desires of Iranian society where the only parameter to judge the value of others is by their financial standing and income. In such an environment a poor Pasteur or Koch or Copernicus or… has absolutley no value and charm. Basically Iranian society has no fascination for a hard working productive scientist if he or she is not producing money.

2-Iranian society specially in Iran has no value system for hard work. Shortcuts are seen as smartness indicators, and the single word that dominates the Iranian culture is the word for cleverness, which is actually socially equivalent to corruption, deception, fraud and theft. This form of cleverness and lies that follow have enormous respect in Iranian society along with traitorship and disloyalty. While a hard worker is culturally ridiculed the dishonorable ways are culturally rewarded and justified.

3-No sense of responsibility whatsoever. Iranians by their upbringing since childhood have no sense to take responsibility and judge the consequences of their action, they are never taught to be sorry. They are never taught to be thankful. They are never taught the good and bad in social context. Basically it is a society still living in wild, and survival is the main target. You are encouraged to snatch things rather work for it. Volunteerism and dedicating your own life for the the humanity and sacrifice has no place in the upbringing of children.

Subsequently adults get away by just blaming the government for all the evils of the society and shortcomings while they are still employed by the gov. themselves.

4- Photocopy and assembly industry. Iranian industry at its best make inferior copies of foreign products or produce assembled stuff out of kits with instruction manuals imported to Iran. The companies run privately or publicly have no sense of research and innovation which are completely alien words and ideas to them. Basically any company and individual in Iran has a firm religious belief that Iran can not invent and should not attempt to either because it can not in the first place. Anything made foreign is better. And all this has root in the following:

5- Distrust for others. Iranians have deep suspicions for every thing Iranian. From gov. to individuals because they so much use deception that they can not trust anything anymore. Be it research or art. The first thing that comes to mind is fraud. Other factors here are jealousy which causes non cooperation between people and departments, a deceptive and hyperjealous beaurocracy wherein the reagents and equipment are more important than research itself and are protected against use in order to protect them from misuse!

6-Suppression of thought freedom. At both government and social level the freedom of thought is suppressed. Basically the culturally ideal Iranian is not capable of any thought and reasoning. He or she follows blindly his or her parents at home does not object in school and university and accepts everything government says without whys and hows.

7- Outdated educational system. Iranian educational system wherein the teacher specially at pre university levels are poorly selected and paid are incapable to stimulate the intellectual sense of the society. At best the education system is a mass data storage and transfer module in which students are required to memorize facts or otherwise which are often of no interest to them. Research, criticism and dissent are punished. Pupils are divided to two future destination of garbage and doctors-engineers. The academical grading is not by knowledge production but by grades and degrees even if they are fake. Professors actively discourage students and there is no encouragement towards research. The attitude of the management is this ” Get the degree and getout, do not use your brain just memory”

8- The government being an extension to the society is no different. The grants are nonexistent or stupidifyingly meager in nature. Scientific funding is considered for the most part a western thing to be avoided. While tens of billions of dollars are spent on corrupt plans and service oriented social programs the amount going to research once the fat commissions of management and beaurocracy is taken out doesnot approach tens of millions. The situation is worsened when it is taken into account that there are thousands of research programs of fake nature polluting
the environment and people with connections who are appointed as research supervisors who even don’t hold high school diplomas. It is very difficult for a nanotechnology researcher with a postdoctoral background to go to a half literate corrupt official for support of his or her research and often forced to beg.

9- A shameful immigration policy that repels the foreigners with qualification away. Any respectable country has immigration policies for highly qualified people and researchers inorder to gain brains and use them, Iran actually throws away whatever it has already. Estimates vary but the economic value of brains running out of the country each year is more than 100 billion dollars more than the total export of the country including oil and gas. Such is the loss. Today Iran is the leader of brain drain in the world.

10- Inefficient corrupt and deceptive government. Strangely enough the different ideological system whether socialistic capitalistic imperialistic Islamic or communist type political system is no impediment to scientific research as widely believed. Science progressed under Stalin as well as it did under British crown. The difference is in seriousness and longterm funding of projects plus an evolutionary survival of the fittest system for researchers and professors to get them work to produce something there by helping the serious and intelligent researchers while deleting out the inefficient ones out of the system.