Message From The Director

Welcome to our site, The National Center for Biotechnology. We are a Virtual center. With the recent developments in communication, it became theoretically possible to stimulate cooperation in Science and Technology without having to put people in the same building but providing them with connections and funds. This is what is now known as a virtual institute.

A virtual institute employs only a handful of people and has no laboratories, no equipment (except computers), and no buildings and does not carry out any scientific research parse. All the saving in funds is used to support cooperation and the work of scientists in their own institutions. In addition the institutions do not lose good faculty. Virtual institutes are now common all over the World.

The success of our center will hopefully act as a model for sister Institutions in Our Arab World.

For many years Arab Scientists have produced good scientific work but very little of it was further developed into technology. For while the purpose of the science is to increase human knogledge, technology is a system based on science and skill: producing a product or service with economic return. Thus Arab societies did not see much benefit from the purely scientific work, leading to the poor support Arab science receives. Our main vision is to try to catalyze this development in the field of biotechnology.

Usama Al-Khalidi