Returning to the State Department, Dr. Dehgan worked with several others to create an Internet portal through which Iraqi scientists could access the full range of scientific literature. It is known the Iraqi Virtual Science Library. Creating it sounds simple, but it wasn’t. It meant raising the money to develop the software, enlisting software developers, and negotiating with publishers to give deep discounts on electronic journal subscriptions. Funding has been secured for the next several years and the CRDF, once again, has taken on the care and maintenance of the library.

In some measure, Dehgan’s success underscore’s the enormous ability of electronic communications to connect and empower – precisely Tom Friedman’s point about a flattening world. What Dehgan did was virtually impossible 15 years earlier when I was trying to do the same job of keeping scientists connected to the scientific literature in the Former Soviet Union. At that time, most institutions around the world were still receiving print journals, which were just beginning to go on-line. But we received lists of journals from FSU libraries through CERN computers and were able to set up a few centers in Russia where scientists could access at least some of the literature abstract databases electronically. Today tens of thousands of journals are available electronically, yet the on-line revolution has yet to jump the digital divide in the poorest countries.