American Scientist

On January 25, 2011, Egyptians swept into the streets to protest then-President Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian regime. Mubarak had been in power for three decades and was planning for a smooth succession of powers to his son, Gamal, who had been the de facto leader of the country since his dad became too old to rule. Protesters chose this date, Egypt’s National Police Day, to express their anger against police brutality.

The country was in a dire situation across all fronts. Masses chanted, asking for bread, freedom, and social justice. A generation of young people paid for their dream of a better Egypt with hundreds of their lives. As a scientist from Egypt, my heart was pounding while watching these grand events unfold from my apartment in Overland Park, Kansas. I had accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Kansas Medical Center in 2010 after completing a previous fellowship at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Frederick, Maryland.

A few days earlier, Tunisian President Ben Ali fled his country after similar massive protests during what came to be known as the Arab Spring. I wondered whether something similar would happen in Egypt. My family and I were glued to our TV screens and computers for about 18 days watching the protests escalate until Mubarak eventually resigned on February 11 and transferred his powers to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. It was a victorious day—one of the happiest days of my life—for those of us who had suffered the oppression of Mubarak’s regime.

Before I left Egypt in September 2003, my life was typical of any other Egyptian youth of this era: devoid of any political activism, because the consequences for participating in such activities were severe. After graduating at the top of my class at the College of Veterinary Medicine of Zagazig University in Egypt and, what is more important, after getting a “security clearance,” I was appointed as a teaching assistant in the virology department at the same institution. This clearance meant that I posed no threat to the government, had no undesirable political orientation, and could be hired for permanent academic positions. A university teaching assistant position in Egypt was the first step on a traditional path to becoming a professor—after earning a few other degrees, promotions, and security clearances. This path was my only option to pursue a career in science, which I loved dearly.

My dream was to secure a government-funded scholarship to pursue my doctorate in the United States and return to Egypt as a well-trained scientist to pass on my experience to students. Even though I wanted to follow a traditional path into science and be like other scientists who write papers and share them among their colleagues, I didn’t foresee the additional role of science communicator that I would take on a few years later. But after a series of experiences, I couldn’t ignore what was happening to science and media as dangerous misinformation began to circulate among the Egyptian public. Egyptian science had stagnated under Mubarak’s repressive rule, and I hoped that a revolution would pave the way toward a better future for science. Reality turned out to be much more complicated, however, leading me to learn important lessons about standing up for science.

My life changed in May 2003 when I received a phone call informing me that the Cambridge Overseas Trust was giving me a scholarship that would allow me to pursue my doctorate at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. After experiencing voter intimidation and suppression firsthand in the 2000 parliamentary election, because of my academic affiliation, I had known I needed to leave the country to continue pursuing my ambitions in science. So I had applied for this scholarship after seeing an advertisement for it in the national newspaper. I hadn’t thought that I would get the scholarship, but I did. I packed my suitcases and departed from the Cairo International Airport on September 29, 2003.

A bit more than three wonderful years later, I submitted my doctoral thesis and then traveled to Washington, DC, on January 8, 2007. I revived my dream of getting research training in the United States, but this time I hoped to stick around and look for a job. After I’d experienced the academic freedom and research funding in Europe, I did not want to give up my dreams of a flourishing scientific career and return to a regrettably hostile environment for science in Egypt.

Politics and Misinformation

After Mubarak resigned in 2011, I felt that Egypt had been reborn and perhaps I should reconsider my decision to stay in the United States. That euphoria didn’t last long. After a couple of months it was obvious that the outcome of this magnificent revolution would depend on how the confrontation between the military and the Islamists panned out. The youths who had sparked this revolution were gradually sidelined, and Islamists dominated the scene.

The first democratic elections in modern Egyptian history gave birth to an incompetent president who belonged to the organized Muslim Brotherhood movement. It was clear that he had no sense of leadership, and the country plunged again into instability that eventually resulted in a military coup. My enthusiasm waned, and I surrendered to my initial plan of focusing on my research career in the United States. I naively thought that I was too distant to be a part of this difficult chaotic transition, but I soon realized that it was my problem too.

Until an incident that was later dubbed “Kofta-gate,” I was a typical scientist. I spent most of my time in the laboratory doing experiments, writing journal articles, and writing funding proposals. Science communication to me meant presenting data to my peers at professional conferences. But that was about to change as I found myself with the unique expertise to combat a new misinformation campaign.

I did not want to give up my dreams of a flourishing scientific career and return to a regrettably hostile environment for science in Egypt.

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In 2012 I accepted a research scientist position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I studied influenza viruses. My journey into science communication began mundanely enough on a morning two years later when I was browsing social media. I didn’t expect Saturday, February 22, 2014, to be any different from any other weekend. My Saturday morning routine usually began with browsing my Facebook newsfeed while having a cup of coffee. I followed updates from the Egyptian military, which was the only real power on the ground after deposing the Muslim Brotherhood president. Like other Egyptians, I was worried about the future. The military described a road map that should in theory bring back the civilian democratic governing system that Egyptians had been longing for since 2011. But nothing was certain at this stage.

I saw a post by the spokesman of the Egyptian military that read as follows, translated from the original Arabic: “The armed forces discovered the first global cure for HIV and hepatitis C.” I am a virologist, so news like this certainly captured my attention. It wouldn’t go unnoticed either in a country such as Egypt, which had about 15 percent hepatitis C prevalence at the time. I had worked on HIV for three years at the NCI, and I knew how hard it would be to cure HIV. Scientists currently have a plethora of drugs that suppress HIV replication and therefore slow the progression into AIDS. A complete cure for the virus, however, has thus far been very challenging because viral DNA integrates into the DNA in the cells of the infected patient. I quickly checked the life sciences search engine PubMed for any relevant publications and found none. So in the midst of this vagueness, I was curious about this news. My curiosity turned quickly into suspicion.

Later that day, someone in my social network posted a video that boasted about a new invention by the Egyptian Armed Forces: a novel device, dubbed C-FAST, which looked like a plastic handle with an antenna. The Armed Forces claimed the device could remotely diagnose viral infections. Wow, diagnosis and cure in one shot! That claim seemed improbable to impossible. My inner circle on social media was interested too. Someone shared a link to a patent application that the Egyptian Armed Forces had submitted to the World Intellectual Property Organization for the C-FAST. Now I had something written in the scientific language that I understand. To my disappointment, this thing was like a fictional piece of equipment from an episode of Star Trek. The application claimed superpowers for this device, such as detecting and distinguishing many unrelated things that included metals, bombs, drugs, and microbes from a distance of 500 meters. But what was the mechanism? The inventors claimed that this device detects some sort of molecular electromagnetic fingerprint of viruses, something I had never heard of throughout my 15 years of virology education.

The next day, news surfaced of an international press conference by the Armed Forces. The star of the show was Major General Ibrahim Abdel-Aty, who shouted, “I conquered AIDS; I can turn the AIDS virus into a kofta skewer,” referring to spiced meat kabobs that are common in Egyptian cuisine. The English-speaking popular press began referring to the incident as Kofta-gate. Abdel-Aty went on to announce the Complete Cure Device (CCD), which looked like a dialysis machine and which he claimed was capable of curing HIV and hepatitis C. The public cheered, and my suspicion turned into agony.

Egypt was going through a very critical phase of its modern history. Many people welcomed the military’s ousting of the elected president and hailed the leaders of this powerful institution as flawless heroes who had saved the country from a chaotic future. The military had been ruling the country since 1952 and was about to return to power after a short stint of other leadership. In 2014 probably every household in Egypt had someone infected with or had lost someone to hepatitis C. With the triad of sickness, poverty, and ignorance, anything could pass as true, and the collateral damage could be enormous. The near consensus among the masses, and strangely among many of the highly educated, was that the Armed Forces would never lie to us. It was awakening to see how “trusted” authorities could foster the spread of misinformation even among those who theoretically should know better.

The state-controlled media’s coverage of these alleged inventions was horrendous. We watched patients on television claiming that they fully recovered after undergoing the treatment course prescribed by Major General Abdel-Aty. The message was clear: The Armed Forces was going to eradicate one of the most awful ailments that Egyptians had ever witnessed. This falsehood could be easily translated into political gains, but I was more concerned about the negative impact of a potentially unsafe therapeutic intervention with no proven efficacy. It takes about 20 years of lab testing and clinical trials for any therapeutic approach to be approved for public use. But these new devices had no clear and sound scientific mechanism of action.

I searched for any scientific publication that explained how the devices worked, but the claims in the C-FAST patent application were clearly bogus. My suspicions were confirmed by a paper detailing the C-FAST device that was published in a predatory journal—a type of journal that would publish anything for money without rigorous peer review. The C-FAST device turned out to be a slightly modified version of a fake bomb detector that a British conman had sold to the Iraqi and other governments. There was not a single published paper supporting the CCD’s efficacy or mechanism of action.

General Abdel-Aty appeared on several TV interviews surrounded by his team of doctors and researchers, and when asked about how his invention worked, he replied, “I can’t reveal anything because it is a proprietary technology owned by the Egyptian military, and I am not going to let anyone steal it.” I checked his background and found no evidence of a medical degree or research track record. He appeared in an old interview on YouTube as a champion of homeopathy and traditional medicine. How could this man be medically treating anyone? Few people were questioning his credibility, however; the military uniform was reassuring enough.

The simple scientific language and calm, neutral tone that I adopted appealed to many.

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In one TV interview, a doctor affiliated with General Abdel-Aty described how the patient’s blood is drawn into the CCD, where it gets exposed to some sort of ultraviolet radiation to exterminate the virus, and then the “cleansed” blood is returned to the patient. How would this process deplete the hepatitis C reservoirs in the liver? How would it eliminate the integrated HIV proviruses in a patient’s immune cells? How would this ultraviolet irradiation distinguish virus particles without harming body cells? And the list of unanswered questions went on. It was clear to me that the device was fraudulent. This case was classic pseudoscience, but this time, it was backed up by Egypt’s most powerful state institution.

At first I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew that the public was being deceived, that patients were in grave danger, and that the integrity of an entire country was in jeopardy. This is not the Egypt we dreamed of, and definitely not the one for which brave young men and women sacrificed their lives in January 2011. I felt a great deal of responsibility but also totally helpless. People in my close network saw me deteriorating but did not understand why. This sophisticated area of science would be hard to explain in a blog post. But what about the millions of people who saw this device as the ultimate antidote? I was not a public figure. I had no media contacts and zero influence on the masses.

Adly Mansour, the interim Egyptian president from July 2013 to June 2014, had hired a scientific advisor, Essam Heggy, a young planetary scientist at NASA who was on my list of contacts. I called him and explained in detail why these claims were false and damaging to the reputation of science in Egypt. On February 25, 2014, he issued a brief press release to inform the public that these claims were unfounded. The next day, the full arsenal of the Egyptian media machine was unleashed against him. The media portrayed him as a disloyal enemy of the state who was being funded by some U.S. sources to discredit the achievements of the Egyptian Armed Forces. It was clear that anyone who spoke against these claims would be fought with campaigns of public defamation. Bassem Youssef, a surgeon-turned-satirist who had a widely viewed satirical show, made a lot of jokes about these devices. He eventually left the country. What was missing from all this coverage was a rational explanation of the science, or rather the pseudoscience, behind these devices.

A volcano of frustration was building up inside me, but I had no idea how to let it out. I thought I should try to explain the situation to my family and friends in the United States and Egypt who didn’t grasp the reason behind my anger. But how? And was it safe to speak publicly about the misinformation? I brainstormed with my wife, Randa, and a group of my friends at MIT. Randa was the most worried. “They can get you,” she said. But I felt that my life was no more valuable than the lives of those who died in January 2011 to give us a better Egypt; I was not going to let down their souls.

I decided I couldn’t stand by while Egyptian science was being misrepresented. I stood in front of a camera and provided a serious scientific critique, akin to what we do in academic journal club meetings. I prepared a few slides and recorded a video that was about 80 minutes long. I thought probably no more than a hundred people would watch it, but at least I would feel like I did all that I could. I made the information freely available on the internet for anyone who was looking for the truth. Soon after I posted the video on YouTube on February 28, 2014, my life was turned upside down.

Within a couple of days, the video went viral and was watched by more than 100,000 people. What was unusual is that this entertainment-free content violated the five-minute rule of viral videos; in internet time, 80 minutes feels like centuries. It seemed like the simple scientific language and calm, neutral tone that I adopted appealed to many people. I was overwhelmed with a slew of phone calls, emails, messages, tweets, and comments on social media. Many of these messages were genuine questions and thank-you notes; others were blatant insults, and some were overt threats that my wife didn’t see until years later.

A prominent, politicized Arabic-speaking television channel tried to schedule me for a prime-time interview. I had spent my life protected by the walls of research labs and communicated science only to my peers, so this sudden situation in the spotlight was like a rollercoaster. I could have easily become a tool in the hands of political opponents of the military regime. My main objective, however, was to correct the misinformation, so I abstained from engaging in any political discussion. The Egyptian Armed Forces announced that they would begin treating patients for hepatitis C en masse in military hospitals on June 30, 2014. For the next four months I used scientific articles and social media blogs to promote my views. I released a second video on April 6, 2014, to respond to the misinformation caused by the frequent appearances of General Abdel-Aty and his colleagues on mass media.

The scientific critiques that I made available through YouTube videos and several articles provided the scientific grounds necessary for people to pursue other means of addressing this major statewide hoax. A prominent example was Mohamed Fatouh, a brave physician who filed a malpractice lawsuit at the Egyptian Medical Syndicate against the doctors involved in Kofta-gate, because they endangered the lives of hepatitis C patients who abandoned their medication. Although no one was punished, the cumulative effect of these efforts led the Egyptian Armed Forces to hold a pathetic press conference on June 28, 2014, announcing the delay of CCD treatments for six months to carry out more experiments. I breathed a sigh of relief for the lives that were saved.

The Armed Forces swept this scandal under the rug, and we haven’t heard anything else from them about the devices. No apology was issued, and no one was held accountable or punished. Gamal Sheeha, one of the doctors who promoted the C-FAST fiasco, is now leading the Education Committee at the Egyptian Parliament.

Becoming a Science YouTuber

To me, this whole experience was probably more powerful than getting a university degree. I began to appreciate the importance of stepping outside of the lab and talking to people about science. Although I am not a celebrity, I think my efforts to correct the misinformation around these fake devices were successful and perhaps opened a path for me to break through geographic barriers and to distill complex science into language that’s easier for the general public to understand.

Shortly after my Kofta-gate videos went viral, I received an invitation from the organizers of TEDxCairo to speak at their 2014 conference. It was not safe for me to visit Egypt while people’s feelings and ambitions were still heated, but I promised to come the next year if all went well.

On May 16, 2015, I gave an 18-minute talk in Cairo about the microorganisms that I have studied for many years: viruses. The room had more than 1,000 people in the live audience—a number that could intimidate even highly skilled public speakers. I had three objectives: I wanted them to hear about viruses as if they had never heard about them before, I wanted them to laugh, and I wanted them to leave the room inspired. I received a standing ovation that brought tears to my eyes. It was a revelation to witness the largely young audience hungry for more accessible science. In that moment I knew that I would continue talking to the general public about topics related to virology.

After I returned home to Boston, my son, Adham, and I started VirolVlog, a video blog about viruses on YouTube. We assembled a self-funded home studio in our basement and taught ourselves how to record and edit high-quality videos. With modest means, we have gathered a good-sized audience for our channel. So far, we have produced 32 vlogs, and we have about 25,000 subscribers to our YouTube channel and about 42,000 followers on Facebook. Despite the irregularity of our posts, due to my limited time and resources, I am determined to continue this venture.

One of my objectives is to provide a scientifically sound narrative instead of complaining about how media outlets synthesize their content to gather clicks and views. I was inspired by an amazing weekly science podcast, called This Week in Virology, which is produced by Vincent Racaniello and his team of cohosts. I wanted to provide something similar in video format for Arabic-speaking audiences.

I believe that videos are the most engaging communication format. Your audience sees your facial expressions and can relate to your emotions. Video also allows you to use visuals, which are helpful tools for explaining complex scientific concepts. Furthermore, videos can go viral, particularly if they connect well with viewers.

Speak Up for Science

Political polarization and the associated misinformation are not limited to Egypt. Reflecting on the past five years, and after becoming a U.S. citizen, I care so much about this country too, and I can certainly see some parallels. We are unfortunate to have politicians at the highest levels of office who reject science and counteract evidence about the life-saving effects of vaccinations and the looming threats of climate change. It is easy for authorities to promote misinformation when it fits into the popular narrative and when there is no alternate source of credible information. On the other hand, credible information took off in Egypt once it was available.

It is easy for authorities to promote misinformation when it fits into the popular narrative and when there is no alternate source of credible information.

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We American scientists are privileged that the U.S. Constitution protects our freedom of speech, and we should never stand by and watch quietly as misinformation about our work spreads. In other places, speaking against the government can cost you dearly. We have a magic tool, the internet, at the tips of our fingers, so let’s use it.

I know that many scientists are not happy with this war on science. Instead of writing an angry tweet, put some effort into creating a video to explain why you are angry. I know that producing a video is quite an undertaking compared to creating PowerPoint presentations, but nothing comes for free. If you don’t defend your science, who else will? You don’t need any sophisticated cameras; you already have a powerful one in your cell phone. A YouTube channel doesn’t cost a penny, and you can disseminate your message to thousands of people.

I wish that science communications were considered part of an academic’s qualifications for promotion. I hope that communicating science becomes a standard output of any grant-funding proposal or journal article. Until academia recognizes this effort and rewards people for doing it, we’ll have to take this extra step and communicate of our own volition. If scientists don’t fill the void, somebody else will, and we might not be happy about it!