Pakistani Nobel Laureate’s Physics Centre Turns 40

Last century, a charismatic Pakistani scientist had to make a terrible decision: choose between a potentially brilliant career abroad, or remain at home in relative poverty and obscurity.

At that time Pakistan offered no scope for postgraduate work. So Abdus Salam joined the brain drain, went to England, and eventually shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking research that remains at the heart of today’s high energy physics.

Salam vowed that no other colleague from the developing world should have to face the same grim choice. So 40 years ago, he did something for which a wide range of scientists from the developing world can be profoundly grateful.

In 1964, Salam persuaded the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to help him set up the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, on Italy’s Adriatic coast…