Four years ago, Dr. Abu Bakr Abdel Moneim Ramadan, a full-time professor in the Sites and Environment Department of the Egyptian Nuclear and Radiation Regulatory Authority, passed away while attending a workshop organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency on marine pollution in Morocco.
Before the cause of death was announced, which was later revealed to be a heart attack, social media preempted any investigations, and adopted the narrative that someone was behind the assassination of an Egyptian nuclear scientist in Morocco. The man, who graduated from the Faculty of Agriculture and whose research was of an environmental nature, was described in terms that were far removed from his scientific abilities and achievements.
The same thing happened a few days ago, with the death of the young Egyptian researcher Reem Hamed in France. The event was also overloaded with more than it could bear, and a conspiracy theory surfaced, with social media analysts going so far as to say that Hamed was assassinated, despite the fact that she works in a popular field of research, which is “biotechnology.” These interpretations were apparently influenced by the story of the assassination of the young Egyptian scientist Samira Moussa in America in the 1950s.
This story contained many details that experts who spoke to Al Jazeera Net agreed were devoid of facts. The only truth, in contrast to a torrent of exaggerations, is that Samira Moussa died, but everything surrounding the causes and circumstances of her death, and even the researcher’s scientific career, is nothing more than “exaggerations” with no basis in truth.
“First female assistant” exaggeration
Samira Moussa was born in Gharbia Governorate (one of the Nile Delta governorates in Egypt) on March 3, 1917. She lost her mother when she was a young child to cancer, and after her mother’s death she moved to Cairo with her father, where she grew up and studied in primary and secondary school.
Although she achieved very high grades in secondary education, which would have allowed her to study engineering, she insisted on joining the Faculty of Science at Cairo University.
She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1939 with first class honours, which qualified her to join the faculty as a teaching assistant. In this context, when reviewing her CV, it is said that she is the first female teaching assistant in the history of the university’s Faculty of Science. This is incorrect information, as Dr. Maher Al-Qadi, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, described it in statements to Al Jazeera Net.
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Al-Qadi is a former assistant professor in the Chemistry Department at Cairo University, and an important activist in the field of tracing the history of the university using Arab and foreign sources, which made him assert that Musa was not the first female teaching assistant.
He had previously published on his Facebook page a photo dating back to 1931, eight years before Musa graduated from the college. The photo included faculty members from the Chemistry Department, including Dr. Zainab Kamel Hassan, who was described in the photo as the first teaching assistant in the history of the College of Science.
This is not the only exaggeration, but the biggest exaggeration is that which speaks of her success in converting cheap elements such as copper into radioactive elements, which was among the reasons that put her in the spotlight and led to her assassination.
He says in astonishment, “Where did they get this talk that has no scientific basis and has not been achieved yet despite the tremendous scientific development?”
The judge does not belittle the late scientist’s right to the fact that she had an early scientific interest in employing nuclear physics in medical treatments, but he pointed out at the same time, according to published research, that she did not achieve breakthroughs that would place her at the center of global attention.
The judge does not want to deny or confirm her assassination, adding that “in light of the escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the fifties, the exaggerated fear of an Egyptian woman working in nuclear research may have led to her assassination, but there are no conclusive facts confirming this assassination, and her scientific production does not contain any breakthroughs that would justify doing so.”
stereotype making
Ali Abdo, a nuclear physicist and scientific advisor to Halliburton, also does not see any notable breakthroughs in Dr. Samira Moussa’s scientific output, pointing out that the mysterious circumstances of her death opened the door to a flood of exaggerations, which is the same thing that happened with her professor, Dr. Mustafa Ali Musharafa.
He told Al Jazeera Net, “Dr. Musharrafa and Dr. Samira Moussa had a great role in science, but at the same time they did not achieve any important breakthroughs, as the general public repeats, who fell captive to the propaganda of the Nasser era, which was exaggerating everything, to show that that era was being targeted.”
As the judge said, Abdo does not have facts that deny or confirm the assassination of Samira Moussa, but he confirms that the Egyptian mind is more inclined to believe the assassination because it occurred due to a stereotype that the media and drama have succeeded in exporting, as evidenced by the fact that Dr. Musharrafa’s brother published a book in which he denied the assassination of his brother, and confirmed that he died under natural circumstances, and yet many insist on believing the story of the assassination.
He explains that, “With the exception of the assassination of Dr. Yahya Al-Mashad in France, which was proven to be an assassination due to his role in the Iraqi nuclear program, in my opinion, there is no Egyptian scientist who has made breakthroughs that would lead to his assassination.”
He added, “When Samira Moussa died, she had finished her doctorate a short time before, and fate did not give her time to show any breakthroughs. A researcher in the doctoral stage learns the correct way of thinking, and achievements always come after the doctorate.”
Reading in production and career
What Al-Qadi and Abdo have said is clearly evident through the analytical reading of the scientific career and scientific production of Dr. Samira Moussa, which Dr. Abdel Nasser Tawfik, head of the Egyptian Center for Theoretical Physics, provided exclusively to Al-Jazeera Net.
Samira Moussa began her postgraduate studies after graduating from the Faculty of Science, Cairo University in 1939. In 1942, she submitted her thesis to the same university to obtain a Master of Science degree, the subject of which was “Convection or Thermal Conductivity of Gases.” Cairo University then sent her on a mission to obtain a doctorate degree at the University of London. In 1948, she completed message The doctorate was entitled “A study of ionization by high-voltage radiation inside ionization chambers and its dependence on insulating materials, as well as research into a possible method for measuring the quality of radiation.” After 3 or 4 years, in 1951, I received a scholarship from the American Fulbright Program.
“This academic trajectory clearly shows that she obtained her doctorate degree within 10 years of her graduation, and in this way she is similar to most researchers in the same specialization, and the scientific topics in the master’s and doctoral stages can easily be classified within the traditional stream of experimental physics research in the late first half of the twentieth century,” Tawfiq says.
“Even in this experimental physical framework, it seems that she employed pre-prepared equipment and did not introduce innovative experimental designs. This was also evident in her interpretation of the experimental results, and is clearly evident in the text of her doctoral dissertation, where she relied exclusively on theories and models developed by other scientists. This assessment does not diminish the merit of the commendation and praise, but it also shows that her scientific production draws on traditional practices in similar scientific research, and there is nothing to indicate that it deviated from them.”
Tawfiq moved from the doctoral stage to the post-doctoral stage by 4 years, during which he published 4 research papers:
A 1949 paper, co-authored with S. W. Watson, published in patrol The British Journal of Radiology, which was derived from a Ph.D. paper in 1950, co-authored with the previous author, in the same journal, similar to the previous paper. A 1951 paper, published in Egyptian Magazine “Proceedings of the Egyptian Mathematical and Physical Society”, which was in the same framework as the previous two papers. The scientific topics developed slightly in 1952, and Searching In the journal Nucleonics, titled “Air and tissue dose comparison of radium gamma radiation,” co-authored by Michael Terboghossian and William Itiner.
“It does not take much effort to confirm the previous assessment that the research path continued in the same vein, whether before or after she obtained her doctorate in 1948,” Tawfiq says.
Wishes far from reality
Although Musa’s interests were specific, as Tawfiq’s review of his doctoral dissertation and postdoctoral research reveals, websites, whether unreliable or affiliated with official institutions, are full of excessive assessments that seem more like wishful thinking than reality.
Tawfiq says, “For example, there is nothing in Dr. Samira Moussa’s scientific publications and research that gives any party the right to claim that she is able to transform inert elements into radioactive elements. This claim is closer to fake science than to physics or chemistry, as there is no magic equation that describes this transformation.”
He adds, “There is no attempt in her scientific publications to derive any mathematical equation, and perhaps the nature of her experimental specialization does not require that. It is also worth noting that, even after more than 7 decades of amazing scientific developments, no one has reached such an equation.”
As for the other interests associated with Dr. Musa’s name, such as the use of nuclear physics in medical treatments or in achieving peace, all of these ideas were repeated by a global scientific community movement that emerged directly after the bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two American nuclear bombs during World War II, and was led by the most prominent scientists, philosophers and presidents until we reached the famous speech of President Eisenhower in 1953, and after that the contributions of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell in 1955.
Tawfiq says, “What happened is that Dr. Samira Moussa adopted such ideas, just like many of her contemporaries.”
After this detailed review, he confirms that “it is useful to emphasize that our role is not to deny that the tragic traffic accident that led to her death was planned, and we do not want to acquit or accuse anyone, but it now seems clear that the link between the accident and the victim’s supernatural scientific abilities requires justifications that are not present in her scientific production.”
He added, “On the other hand, some security experts believe that her repeated talk and intense enthusiasm for Egypt possessing nuclear weapons, building nuclear laboratories, transferring nuclear technologies to Egypt, and the like, which were not within her original scientific specialization, brought her troubles that, unfortunately, led to her death.”
The Unknown Journey to California
Just as her scientific career was surrounded by a torrent of exaggerations and rumors, the same thing happened with the incident of her mysterious death, according to the Algerian archivist Bahija Omar, who conducted an investigation into the circumstances of her death.
Omar told Al Jazeera Net, “It is common that she died in California, but this did not happen. The death occurred in Central America before she reached her destination.”
Omar did not find in the investigation papers, which she reviewed from her archival sources, anything that indicated, even remotely, the reason for the trip she took by car from St. Louis to California, and that there is no indication, even remotely, that she was heading to visit some nuclear laboratories in California, as is commonly believed.
Another rumor surrounding the death is that a truck hit her car from behind, which is not proven in the papers, which indicate that the death occurred due to a normal traffic accident, which caused the death of Musa, who was sitting behind the driver of the car, who did not jump out of it as is commonly believed, and a person sitting next to the driver, who was apparently responsible for taking Musa to her destination, which no one knew about.
Although the death is recorded in America as a result of a normal traffic accident, Omar sees it as a mysterious death, the secrets of which have not been revealed, and the solution comes in her estimation by knowing the destination that Musa was heading to.
Therefore, the only truth in the story of her assassination is that she died, and everything that has been woven around her death is nothing more than exaggerations and rumors.
