Windhoek
Egyptian Professor Ahmed Zewail, a world-renowned US-based Nobel Prize-winning chemist, has died at the age of 70 in North America, where he had served in several professorships at numerous universities.
He died on Tuesday and his body was flown to Egypt, where he was accorded a high-profile military funeral led by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who said: “Egypt lost one of its loyal citizens and a genius scientist, who spared no effort to serve his country in the various arenas.”
Zewail was interred at a family graveyard at a ceremony witnessed by senior academics, military generals, members of the judiciary, family, friends and high-ranking Egyptian officials.
Egyptian Ambassador to Namibia Mahmoud Fawzy Abou-dounya confirmed the death of arguably one of the most celebrated African professors, whose résumé is as extraordinary as his academic achievements.
“The passing of Professor Ahmed Zewail is a great loss for Egypt, Africa and for the whole world,” said Abou-dounya, who on Tuesday morning opened a book of condolences in memory of the life of Zewail, who once served as Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics and was the director at the NSF Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, among academic positions too numerous to mention for the man awarded the Noble Prize for Chemistry in 1999.
The book of condolences is open to members of the public and closes today.
Professor Zewail has a string of degrees from Alexandria University in Egypt (1967), the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (USA) where he got a Ph.D and has over 40 honorary degrees from such prestigious institutions as Oxford University and Cambridge in England, Boston University in Massachusetts (USA) and Lund University in Sweden, where he was awarded a Ph.D in Philosophy.
He was awarded a prize for his seminal work in chemistry for developing a revolutionary technique to observe the dance of molecules as they break apart and come together in chemical reactions.
Chemists have long studied chemical reactions by looking at the ingredients they start with, the final products they produce and, sometimes, transitory molecules along the way. But they could not watch the actual dynamics of the process, because the breaking and shifting of chemical bonds occurs very quickly.
A vibration of an atom in a molecule typically takes 10 to 100 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second.
To capture the molecules in so infinitesimal a moment, Dr Zewail took advantage of advances in lasers that could fire ultra-short pulses, using them as strobe lights. One laser pulse would set off the chemical reaction, then a second pulse would record the state of the molecule through the colours of light the molecule absorbed and emitted.
By repeating the same experiment many times, varying the time between the pulses, Dr Zewail and his colleagues could, in essence, piece together a movie of the reaction. A new field of research, femtochemistry, was created and flourished.
“He wanted to go somewhere science hadn’t gotten before,” said Peter Dervan, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.
After receiving the Nobel Prize, Dr Zewail also devoted time to improving scientific research in Egypt. “We’ve got to teach them that research is very important,’” Dr Sayed believed.
Instead of Egyptians going abroad for doctoral studies, as he had, he wanted to create an independent, cutting-edge research institution in Egypt. And with others he did, in Cairo: the Zewail City of Science and Technology, which Dr Dervan described as “a Caltech in Egypt”.
The cornerstone was laid in 2000, but the project languished until the overthrow of former president Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Dr Zewail, who led the board of trustees, spearheaded fundraising, mostly from individuals.
Zewail City eventually opened its classrooms to students in 2013 and there are now 535 students enrolled. Part of Dr Zewail’s vision was to restore the Arab world to its historical place as a centre of learning. In an op-ed published in The New York Times in 2013, Zewail wrote: “Westerners often forget Egypt’s long history of educational accomplishment. Al Azhar University, a centre of Islamic learning, predates Oxford and Cambridge by centuries. Cairo University, founded in 1908, has been a centre of enlightenment for the whole Arab world.”