Why did you become a scientist?
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I remember very clearly the beginning of my conscious life, and by that I mean intellectually conscious life. I have this huge, huge recklessness inside myself to know the how and why questions. Why are we here? What are we doing? How does the universe function? And most of all, how does my own body function? These were fundamental questions and I remember walking for hours and thinking all these things. And I caught the answer-at one point I was directed towards chemistry. And it occurred the answer to everything lies in understanding chemistry. Everything in the body is construed at heart chemically and that's how I got into chemistry. And the deeper I went into it, the more intriguing it became.
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Does the general public properly appreciate science?
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My answer is yes. The general public sees the ease that has been produced, ease of operation. The general public sees the enormous amount of improvement in the health care systems. The general public also sees improvement in communication and traveling and in agriculture and in so many other ways.
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Why did you become disillusioned with science?
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By the time I finished my Ph.D., it was very clear to me that the answers that I'm seeking do not lie in science…In fact, my Ph.D. work was in the synthesis of new chemicals, and that was a hugely disenchanting experience, because at the end of the day, I was standing there in front of the machine, counting the number of drops coming down. And I was looking into these NMR -- nuclear magnetic resonance spectras -- coming out, and trying to make sense of these, of the behavior of these molecules. In science, I found in the end was none of those idealistic things that you do in order to understand how nature works. Science, contemporary science is totally controlled and construed by the market economy. We do scientific research, at least 90 percent of it, to solve certain problems, and those problems are connected with market and what we want to sell, how we want to go about doing our daily business. So we are not really in the era of scientific research. We are discovering some hidden secrets of nature, perhaps only a small fraction of science is doing that. Actually, the science I did wasn't part of that. And most of the science requires huge amounts of funding, and that funding comes from agencies or drug companies or organizations, which require their political reserves. So I got disenchanted with practical science.
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What other subjects besides science have contributed to your development?
“And I was fascinated by a construction of reality that exists outside the real world through literature, through fiction, primarily.”
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Along with my interest in science came the interest in literature. And I was fascinated by a construction of reality that exists outside the real world through literature, through fiction, primarily. And I read all the classics. I was fascinated by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. Herman Melville, who still remains my favorite. People who have struggled with the turmoil in the human spirit, people who have written about the inner struggle that takes place in the soul. Faulkner is one of my favorites, too. So science and literature went hand in hand in my life for several years. And I wrote novels, I started chemistry.
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What advice do you have for young people?
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Because of science and these products are so powerful and they are dominating our lives, I think it's very important to be aware of the fact that there are several, there are numerous things in human life, in human existence that are beyond the realm of science. And just because science and these products they'll need a quality control effect and to many, to a great extent, construe the way we think, the way we talk, the way we behave, the way we live. We need to be actively consciously clear that this is not the *Crokanity of reality.
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How would you like to be remembered?
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I think my biggest desire is to see a revival of the Islamic tradition of learning. And the way I see that tradition of learning is that it was deeply rooted in the two primary sources of Islam and it produced a holistic approach to everything. So that's my desire, that's how I would like to be remembered, to someone who continued to do the process of revival of their tradition of learning, which was holistic.
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