The Strength To Resist

Zafra Lerman is a chemist by training who forges strong bonds in the human sphere: She is President of the Malta Conferences Foundation, which assembles scientists from 15 Middle Eastern countries to solve critical problems and foster trust between nations. Lerman began as a researcher and an educator, but witnessing the human rights abuses inflicted on Soviet Union scientists prompted her to pursue humanitarian work and science diplomacy. For over two decades, she chaired the American Chemical Society’s Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights, helping to secure the freedom of scientist-dissidents in the Soviet Union and China.

What gives people the conviction to dissent?

People whose human rights are abused fight and suffer for their conviction and belief in doing the right thing. No pressure in the world can change their minds and their deeds. They're a different kind of person.

I just visited two dissidents from Iran whom I helped to get to the U.S. They had gotten a number of professors, 50 or 100, to write a letter demanding democracy, and they were arrested and put in jail. They felt that they had done the right thing and are proud of what they did. They are thankful to be in San Francisco now and not in Iran. I believe that if they had the chance to do the same thing again, they would.

When I began working with Soviet scientists, I wanted to help people who were suffering through no fault of their own, only for believing in the right thing.

As Soviet dissident Yuri Tarnopolsky wrote to me, “I often wondered what could make a person living in freedom, safety, and comfort fight for somebody deprived of all that and languishing somewhere on the other side of the globe.…I realized that both the faraway victim and his American guardian angel had something in common. They had the same ability to go against the tide, and they did for science something which could hardly be rationalized, an exhausting messy job of fixing its very foundation, invisible on the pages of professional journals; they kept science both human and humane.”