RFK

United States Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has sparked uproar with comments he has made denying Arab contributions to mathematics, science and literature.

In a high-voltage rant on Monday, the US health secretary said, “There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”

RFK Jr, who has been involved in anti-vaccine campaigns and has promoted a debunked theory linking vaccines to autism, made the comments during a US election campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan while supporting Republican nominee Mike Rogers, who is up against Arab-American Democrat nominee Abdul El-Sayed, in a tightly contested battle for Michigan’s Senate seat in next week’s midterm elections.

Critics said the comments were racist, Islamophobic and factually inaccurate, pointing to modern and historic Arab innovation in multiple fields.

Here’s how Arabs have made vital contributions to the human understanding of maths, science and literature through the centuries.

Arab contributions to maths, science and humanities

The period known as the Islamic Golden Age, from around 750 AD to 1258 AD, produced many key Arab contributions to medicine at a time when Europe was said to be in its Dark Ages. During this time, Arabic was the language of science and scholarship.

1st-4th centuries: The numerals 0-9, which originated in ancient India, were adopted by Arab mathematicians who spread them across the world. They displaced Roman numerals as a more advanced number system in mathematics.

8th century: Arab and Persian mathematicians were studying the ancient Indian concept of zero in mathematics in Baghdad, long before the Europeans. The number zero was crucial to the development of mathematics – but was absent from widely used Roman numerals in Europe.

813-833: The Arab mathematician Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi – one of those studying the number 0 – is often referred to as the “father of algebra” as he was the first to treat the method as a separate mathematical discipline in his work, Al-Jabr. This method provided the first linear and quadratic equations, still used as a core part of mathematical study today.

965-1040: Ibn al-Haytham, known as the “father of modern optics”, explained the role that light entering the eye plays in human vision. He was born in Basra in Iraq, but spent most of his working life in Cairo attending to noble families.

936-1013: Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, called “the father of modern surgery”, was considered the greatest surgeon in the Middle Ages. He wrote a 30-volume encyclopaedia detailing medical practices and designed and illustrated many surgical instruments. Born in Azahara, in Andalusia, he was known as Abulcasis in Europe.

9th century: Fatima al-Fihri founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco. It is often cited as the oldest continually operating university.

1213-1288: Ibn al-Nafis described pulmonary circulation – the process by which blood passes through the lungs – several centuries before Europeans understood it. He wrote more than 110 volumes of work on surgery, ophthalmology and philosophy while working as a chief physician in Egypt.

915-965:  Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi, regarded as the greatest poet in the Arabic language, was Yemeni and grew up immersed in Bedouin Arabic culture. He wrote in classical Arabic and many of his verses became sayings used in everyday Arabic.

1100-1165: Muhammad al-Idrisi was a geographer known for making the Tabula Rogeriana, one of the most accurate and detailed medieval world maps, and a high point of Islamic geography. He was born in Ceuta in Morocco.

Prize-winning Arabs

In more modern times, RFK Jr’s assertion that Arabs do not win Nobel prizes for science and literature is very far from the truth. Here are some of the highlights:

1960: Nobel Prize for Medicine

Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for work on for work on acquired immune tolerance, which underpins organ transplantation. He was born in Brazil to a Lebanese father.

1966: The Fields Medal

Michael Atiyah won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award for mathematics, in 1966. He was born in London to a Lebanese father and Scottish mother. Educated in Egypt, he spent much of his childhood in Cairo and Khartoum.

1988: Nobel Prize for Literature

Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work, including the Cairo Trilogy, which the Swedish Academy said formed “an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind”. He is still the only winner of the prize who wrote in Arabic.

1990: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Elias James Corey won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing retrosynthetic analysis. He is an American of Lebanese descent.

1993: Wolf Prize for Chemistry

Egyptian Ahmed Zewail won the Wolf Prize for Chemistry. The Wolf Prize is an international award which has been presented to living scientists and artists every year in Israel by the Wolf Foundation since 1978.

1999: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Zewail also won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for pioneering femtochemistry, which is the study of chemical reactions on extremely short timescales. He also won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1993.

2005: Nobel Peace Prize

Egyptian scientist Mohamed ElBaradei shared his Nobel Prize with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he led.

2018: Wolf Prize for Chemistry

Omar M Yaghi,  born in Jordan to a Palestinian refugee family, won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for work on metal-organic frameworks. He shared the prize with Japan’s Makoto Fujita. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) condemned his acceptance of the award because the prize is awarded by an Israeli foundation.

2023: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Moungi Bawendi won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots. He was born in France to a Tunisian father, but based in the US.

2025: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Yaghi also won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing metal-organic frameworks. These are crystalline materials with large internal cavities that can capture and store gases, harvest water from air, and trap pollutants. He shared the prize with Susumu Kitagawa from Japan and Richard Robson from Australia.

In a post on X, vaccine scientist Peter Hotez of the Texas Medical Center weighed in on historical Arab scholarship, saying, “It was the Arab scientists of the Middle Ages who kept Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen alive to hand it down in the Renaissance.”

Broadcaster Mehdi Hasan described RFK Jr’s comments as “racist” and, in a post on X, wrote: “One of the men who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry last year was a Palestinian-American, Omar Yaghi.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called for the US health secretary to be removed. It said: “To stand on a public stage as a sitting US cabinet official and dehumanise half a billion people – and millions of Muslim and Christian Arab Americans – with fabricated, white supremacist talking points is utterly disqualifying for public office. His sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity is not only maliciously false, but it also fans the flames of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate at a time when communities are already vulnerable to bigoted attacks from other public officials nationwide.”

FOOTHILL FARMS, Calif. — As a California state lawmaker, Richard Pan authored some of the strongest vaccine laws in the country.

His reward — and part of the backlash, on top of death threats — was being physically assaulted outside the Capitol in Sacramento and spattered with blood thrown from the gallery.

Now, a few years removed from the state Senate and teaching health policy at UC Davis, Pan is running for Congress, in part to fight an old nemesis, the terminally misguided Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and to arrest the Trump administration’s sledgehammering of the nation’s public healthcare system.

“We need people in Congress who have the background, the training, the knowledge to basically hold this administration accountable,” Pan said last week on a baking 100-degree day in the Sacramento suburbs.

“I know what it’s like to be on the front lines,” said Pan, who spent a dozen years teaching and practicing pediatrics before being elected to the Assembly in 2010. “I’ve seen measles, right?”

In fact, his push to toughen vaccination requirements was spurred by a 2014-15 measles outbreak at Disneyland, which, at the time, was one of the largest and most significant epidemics to arise after the disease was supposedly eliminated from the U.S. in 2000.

Little did we know.

Every action has an equal and opposition reaction, a law of physics that’s equally applicable to the realm of politics.

Pan is part of a wave of doctors and scientists running for office this November — for school boards, city councils, state legislatures, the House and U.S. Senate — owing in good part to Kennedy’s quackery and the hollowing out of such vital health and research agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

The political organization 3.14 Action — its name a decimal approximation of pi — has recruited and helped elect hundreds of candidates from STEM backgrounds (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and endorsed more than 500 of those running this year, including Pan in his race in Sacramento and in neighboring Placer and Yolo counties.

Dr. Richard Pan meets Dr. Teah Harris-Johnson and her daughter before participating in a roundtable discussion at Liberty Towers Church in Sacramento.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist who worked on drug discovery and breast cancer research, founded 3.14 Action in 2016 after two unsuccessful tries for a congressional seat in the Philadelphia suburbs. When she started the organization, Naughton noted, there were more talk radio hosts on Capitol Hill than scientists and engineers. (Nearly two dozen doctors and nurses currently serve in Congress. More than 30 have run this election cycle.)

“There isn’t an issue that doesn’t benefit by having fact-based decision-makers, people that will go into office as problem-solvers,” Naughton said from Pennsylvania, which is in the throes of the nation’s worst measles outbreak in more than three decades. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy has downplayed the severity, even as the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases is rising.

“That’s essentially what scientists and physicians are,” Naughton said. “They are problem-solvers. and clearly our country is facing a lot of problems.”

Among those she cited was “the arsonist in charge of HHS.”

Pan has a history with Kennedy, who has long reigned as one of the country’s preeminent anti-vaxxers.

In 2015, he helped summon hundreds of demonstrators to Sacramento to protest Pan’s legislation tightening vaccination requirements. (Kennedy later apologized for using the word “holocaust” to condemn the proposed law, though he revisited the Nazi analogy during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

In 2019, Kennedy returned to Sacramento to oppose another bill Pan authored, this one tightening the rules for vaccination exemptions. Again, he was joined by an army of protesters. Tensions peaked when a demonstrator threw a cup of blood from the spectators’ gallery onto the Senate floor, halting business for several hours before the bill passed.

Dr. Richard Pan sits between Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood and Sean Frame, a candidate for state Senate, at the maternal health roundtable.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

Pan’s opponent in November is Rep. Kevin Kiley, a conservative Republican running as an independent.

Seeking election in a Democratic-tilting district drawn under Proposition 50, the voter-passed gerrymander, Kiley has sought to distance himself from Trump and the MAGA movement, saying he would not caucus with GOP lawmakers if he returned to Washington.

Like his jury-rigged political persona, Kiley seems to want it both ways on vaccines.

Before going to Congress, while serving in the Assembly, Kiley voted against Pan’s legislation cracking down on fraudulent vaccine exemptions. He’s described vaccines as a vital public health tool, but condemned government mandates and suggested vaccination should be a matter of parental choice. He claims Pan has eroded public trust by politicizing the issue.

As for Kennedy, Kiley told the San Francisco Chronicle a lot of things “that I don’t agree with,” though he’s never called out the secretary for his cuckoo-land theories — vaccines cause autism, the fluoride in public water supplies is making Americans “stupider,” and many more — or denounced his destructive policies.

That passivity, Pan said, amounts to complicity.

“It’s not just simply a talking point,” Pan said of public health policy. “It’s reality and we need to have policy based on what’s really happening, not on some ideological conspiracy theory.”

Dr. Richard Pan participates in a discussion during a Black maternal health roundtable last week at Liberty Towers Church in Sacramento.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

Pan’s campaign is focused on more than vaccines and RFK Jr.

Like most Democrats, he’s made affordability a key part of his candidacy, citing higher gas and grocery prices and, inevitably, the rising cost of healthcare and the roughly $1-trillion cut from Medicaid under last year’s Big Sop To Billionaires Bill.

The super-wealthy got tax cuts, Pan told a silver-haired audience at a 55-and-older community in Roseville, while the bill will make healthcare less accessible for millions and undermine both Medicare and Social Security. Kiley supported the legislation, the centerpiece of Trump’s second term. As a doctor and state lawmaker, Pan said, he worked to expand healthcare and address the needs of his community.

“We don’t pass laws to make lives harder,” Pan said. “That’s what he’s done.”

Later, at a forum on Black maternal health, Pan said Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the so-called war on woke ignores glaring disparities in the treatment of Black women versus other patients. “The data is there,” said Pan, speaking before a banner decorated with purple butterflies and the proclamation, “Black Mothers Matter.”

“The facts are there,” Pan went on. “It’s a very, very real problem and it needs to be addressed and it needs to be solved.”

He brought up, somewhat sheepishly, his campaign.

“That’s why I’m running,” Pan said, to “have another person in Congress … who’s going to tell the administration we are not going to bury DEI. We’re not going to bury disparities. These are real problems.”

As is the assault on science, the undermining of research and the promotion of nutty nostrums by those at the highest levels of the federal government.

Hopefully, the midterm election will begin the healing process.