In Appeal To The West, Vietnam Seeks U.S. Support In Science

WASHINGTON—”Vietnamese science,” says physicist Nguyen Van Hieu, “is only a little boy. We hope that the United States can help us to become strong and healthy.” Fourteen years after the end of a bitter war, Vietnam is trying to enlist U.S. scientists in an ambitious campaign to rebuild its impoverished country. The job won’t be easy: The U.S. has a ban on all trade with Vietnam, the two governments have no diplomatic relations, and there is no tradition of scientific collaboration between the two countries. But Hieu, president of his country’s National Center for Scientific Research, is determined to overcome those obstacles and prepare his country for the 21st century. The 51-year-old Hieu, who spent several days in the U.S. last month as a guest of the Federation of American Scientists, is an ideal emissary for such a mission. He’s an outgoing, articulate, and experienced goodwill ambassador who, in 1978, was the first official from socialist Vietnam to receive a visa to visit the U.S. He’s a renowned elementary particle physicist, with honors that include the Lenin Prize. And his career embodies the idea that science is an international venture. Born in Vietnam when it was still nam was created. Although its founder, physicist Edward Cooperman of California State University, Fullerton, died in 1984, the committee has grown to the point where this year it will sponsor 70 Vietnamese scientists in the U.S. and send 40 U.S. scientists to various parts of Vietnam. Drawing on private funding and contributions from 550 academics around the country, the committee sponsors some 45 projects and works with several government agencies, universities, and research centers throughout Vietnam. “We cannot get one dollar from the federal government, so our ability to help is limited by our access to private resources,” says Judith Ludinsky associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Wisconsin medical school and current head of the U.S. committee. Nevertheless, says Ludinsky, the committee provides up to 15 tons of books and journals and roughly $500,000 worth of educational and scientific equipment each year to Vietnamese scientists. The aid is completely legal— the committee holds the federal license it needs—but the absence of formal ties between the two countries makes its work much more difficult. Visas for visiting U.S. and Vietnamese scientists are issued in Bangkok, Thailand, for example, and the Vietnamese are not permitted to bring any money with them when they come to the U.S. “Normalization would make our work much easier,” acknowledges Ludinsky, who has made 29 trips to Vietnam since 1980 in connection with her work for the U.S. committee and with primary and preventive health care programs throughout the country. “But I think that cooperation will expand regardless of what happens politically.” Helping Both Sides The committee relies on personal ties among scientists to carry out much of its work. Last year, for example, the committee received permission from the U.S. government to bring Vietnamese scientists here to study for an extended period. But the placement of Vietnamese biologist Nguyen Thao (see accompanying story) in a molecular-biology laboratory at the University of Minnesota was made possible only after Alan Hooper, a professor of genetics and cell biology and a board member of the U.S. committee, shopped around and found a colleague that needed someone with Thao’s skills. The result is a collaboration that helps both sides. “His training is probably a little more primitive than most American postdocs,” says James Fuchs, a molecular biologist who has taken Thao on as part of his grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health. “We’re more advanced than the Soviet Union [where Thao was educated] in this area, and the field moves so rapidly that it’s easy to fall behind if you don’t have access to modern facilities and current literature. “But Thao has had pretty good training, and he’s got areal knack for languages,” adds Fuchs. (Thao speaks Russian, French, and English as well as Vietnamese.) “He’s working on a project that will take at least a year, and he’s doing it basically by himself.” Vietnam offers a sizable pool of such well-trained scientists, says University of Minnesota physicist J. Woods Halley, who is active in the U.S. committee and has worked as a consultant for a United Nations Economic Development project in Vietnam. That talent, he adds, combined with a more relaxed atmosphere on both sides toward long-term visits to the U.S., should spur cooperation between the two countries. “Vietnam is not like China was 15 years ago,” says Halley. “It never carried out an anti-intellectual campaign in which scientists were sent out to the fields for re-education. All through the-wars it continued to train people, and they are very highly skilled. They’re frustrated because they don't have the right equipment but the opportunities for cooperative efforts are substantial.” Still, two-way cooperation should benefit both sides. For Vietnam, that means science with a decidedly applied bent. “They want to develop their mineral resources— certain rare earths, for example, like titanium dioxide—with an eye toward making better use of what they have,” says Halley. But such approach can also intersect with research interests of a theoretical Physicist like Halley, who is investigating the use of optical methods to test the purity of certain rare earths. The key, says Halley, is to keep in mind the economic realities facing Vietnam. “There’s not much for a high-energy physicist from the U.S. to do,” says Halley, “although Hieu has a small group of mostly older scientists working in that area. The younger students are definitely encouraged to go into more applied areas. Even Hieu’s work on hightemperature superconductivity is a bit theoretical, but at least there’s a possible application somewhere down the road.” Sometimes, however, Vietnam provides a unique opportunity to pursue research not possible here. Such was the case for Arnold Schecter, a professor of preventive medicine at the State University of New York-Health Science Center in Binghamton, who studies dioxin levels in human tissue and foods. ‘Living Laboratory’ The extensive spraying of Agent Orange by the U.S. in South Vietnam has produced dioxin levels in mother’s milk that are up to 100 times the levels in the West. Vietnam, therefore, is an ideal setting to develop techniques for measuring the toxic substance and to study its effects on humans. Since 1984 Schecter has visited Vietnam seven times, and has even been given an office in Hanoi. At the same time, he has hosted Vietnamese scientists in his laboratory. Beyond the obvious importance of the work to Vietnam, Schecter’s dioxin studies are relevant to clinical studies of U.S. soldiers who were exposed to the spraying in Vietnam and to cases in which the public has been exposed to industrial sources of dioxin. “Vietnam, unfortunately, is a unique living laboratory for the study of the environmental effects of dioxin,” Schecter says. “There’s a fairly large population that has been exposed to dioxin over long periods of time. We’ve showed that it was possible to measure [dioxini levels in the general population, and we think that we’ve developed a protocol for measuring patients.” Both Schecter and Halley have worked with Ludinsky’s U.S. committee, which for a decade has been the major player inwhat has so far been a tiny field. But interest in Vietnam appears to be growing. Last spring Jeremy Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists, was Hieu's guest for a visit to Vietnam and Kampuchea. Stone reciprocated by inviting Hieu to the U.S., as well as introducing him to a segment of the U.S. scientific community. In the span of afew days Hieu met with John Gibbons, director of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and Frank Press, president of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as traveling to Princeton to visit physics Nobel laureate Philip Anderson and to New York to see colleagues at City College, City University of New York City. Notwithstanding that whirlwind tour, the likelihood of a major collaboration with Vietnam that goes beyond the level of individual scientists remains small in the near future. “I don’t sense any strong interest by U.S. scientists in forming collaborative agreements with Vietnam,” says Press. “And as far as the academy is concerned, we have a hard enough time maintaining the programs we have with other developing countries, such as the one with Mexico. They are costly, and we have limited resources.” Like Halley, Press stressed the differences between Vietnam and China. But the comparison favors its neighbor to the north. “Once China opened up to the West, there was a strong desire to establish ties with them, because we had trained so many of their scientists back in the 1930s,” he says. “I don’t sense a similar cultural or intellectual bond between U.S. and Vietnamese scientists.” The U.S. government has no plans to pursue a collaborative scientific agreement with Vietnam, according to the State Department. “The Vietnamese haven’t requested anything of the sort,” says Teresa Jones of the department’s office of cooperative science and technology programs, “and we’ve never gotten a request from a U.S. agency to initiate any type of agreement.” According to an NIH official who handles international programs, “there have been no contacts in the five years I’ve been on the desk. But that’s no surprises—we’re not allowed to.” Still, those who know him say that if anyone can build a bridge between U.S. and Vietnamese scientists, it’s Hieu. “He’s a superb scientist,” says Herman Cummins, a physicist at City College. “Just the chance to collaborate with him is exciting. And I’m sure that, once the diplomatic arrangements are worked out, he’ll make sure that Vietnam sends us their very best students.” Equally high praise comes from Minnesota’s Halley. He recalls introducing Hieu to a U.S. colleague at some international conference and watching the’ colleague, whose liberal views on the Vietnam War matched Halley’s, talk pleasantly with Hieu about the tragic nature of that conflict later on the colleague hearq Hieu present a scientific paper. “Gee,” Halley recalls the colleague saying later, “if I’d have known that this guy was so good, I’d have talked physics with hirn, not politics.” For more information about the U.S. Committee on Scientific Cooperation with Vietnam, contact Judith Ludinsky, do Department of Preventive Medicine, 1300 University Ave., University of Wisconsin Medical School, Madison, Wis. 53706; (608) 263-4150.

In Appeal To The West, Vietnam Seeks U.S. Support In Science

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