Science and technology in Iran
Iran has made considerable advances in science and technology through education and training, despite international sanctions in almost all aspects of research during the past 30 years.
The first five rows of Khayam-Pascal's triangle The 9th century mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi founded algebra and expanded upon Persian and Indian arithmetic systems.
Documents indicate that condemned criminals' bodies were dissected and used for medical research during this timeframe[18] In due course, Persians' methods of gathering scientific information would undergo a major change.
In the aftermath of the conquest of Islam, Muslim armies destroyed major libraries, and as a result, Persian scholars were deeply concerned as knowledge of the fields of science had been lost.
[18] In the 10th century work of Shahnameh, Ferdowsi describes a Caesarean section performed on Rudabeh, during which a special wine agent was prepared by a Zoroastrian priest and used to produce unconsciousness for the operation.
Later in the 10th century, Abu Bakr Muhammad Bin Zakaria Razi is considered the founder of practical physics and the inventor of the special or net weight of matter.
After the Islamic conquest of Iran, medicine continued to flourish with the rise of notables such as Rhazes and Haly Abbas, albeit Baghdad was the new cosmopolitan inheritor of Sassanid Jundishapur's medical academy.
His music therapy was used as a means of promoting healing and he was one of the first people to realize that diet influences the function of the body and the predisposition to disease[18] An idea of the number of medical works composed in Persian alone may be gathered from Adolf Fonahn's Zur Quellenkunde der Persischen Medizin, published in Leipzig in 1910.
In 21st century, we witnessed a huge surge in the number of publications in medical journals by Iranian scientists on nearly all areas in basic and clinical medicine.
[25] The authors of the alchemical texts (c. 850−950) attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan pioneered the chemical use of vegetable and animal substances, which at the time represented an innovative shift towards organic chemistry.
[28] Kamal al-Din Al-Farisi (1267–1318) born in Tabriz, Iran, is known for giving the first mathematically satisfactory (though incorrect) explanation of the rainbow, and an explication of the nature of colours that reformed the theory of Ibn al-Haytham.
In February 2014, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei introduced what he called the 'economy of resistance', an economic plan advocating innovation and a lesser dependence on imports that reasserted key provisions of Vision 2025.
According to Article 15 of the Fifth Five-Year Economic Development Plan, university programmes in the humanities were to teach the virtues of critical thinking, theorization and multidisciplinary studies.
The increasingly tough sanctions regime oriented the Iranian economy towards the domestic market and, by erecting barriers to foreign imports, encouraged knowledge-based enterprises to localize production.
High field nuclear magnetic resonance facility, microcalorimetry, circular dichroism, and instruments for single protein channel studies have been provided in Iran during the past two decades.
[72] After the Iranian revolution, there have been efforts by the religious scholars to assimilate Islam with modern science and this is seen by some as the reason behind the recent successes of Iran to augment its scientific output.
[78] The Hematology, Oncology and Bone Marrow Transplantation Research Center (HORC) of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Shariati Hospital was established in 1991.
The gasteroenterology research center based at Tehran University of Medical Sciences has produced increasing numbers of scientific publications since its establishment.
The agriculture researchers are working jointly with international Institutes to find the best procedures and genotypes to overcome produce failure and to increase yield.
Noargen uses the concept of CMO and CRO servicing to the biopharma sector of Iran as its main activity to fill the gap and promote developing biotech ideas/products toward commercialization.
In 2008, NIC established an Econano network to promote the scientific and industrial development of nanotechnology among fellow members of the Economic Cooperation Organization, namely Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
[29] On 17 August 2008, The Iranian Space Agency proceeded with the second test launch of a three stages Safir SLV from a site south of Semnan in the northern part of the Dasht-e-Kavir desert.
[133] On 6 December 2024, Simorgh SLV launched Saman-1 orbital transfer block to an altitude of 400 kilometers, along with two other payloads (including the Fakhr-1 satellite), with a total weight of 300 kilograms.
[137] The Iranian government has committed 150 billion rials (roughly 16 million US dollars)[138] for a telescope, an observatory, and a training program, all part of a plan to build up the country's astronomy base.
In 2024, using the Iranian National Observatory Lens Array (INOLA), the first ever attempt at exploring the stellar halo of M33 Galaxy using ultra-deep broad-band imaging was conducted and reported.
Many Nobel laureates and influential scientists such as Bruce Alberts, F. Sherwood Rowland, Kurt Wüthrich, Stephen Hawking, and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes visited Iran after the Iranian revolution.
[29][158] Iran hosts several international research centres, including the following established between 2010 and 2014 under the auspices of the United Nations: the Regional Center for Science Park and Technology Incubator Development (UNESCO, est.
[159] Iranian scientists are also helping to construct the Compact Muon Solenoid, a detector for the Large Hadron Collider of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) that is due to come online in 2008[citation needed].
[162] Since the lifting of international sanctions, Iran has been developing scientific and educational links with Kuwait, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, China and Russia.
Nima Arkani-Hamed, is a noted theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who is known for large extra dimensions and scattering amplitudes.
