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EDUCATION. Founder's death unsettles Egypt's science city.

obel Prize–winning chemist Ahmed Zewail lived to see his dream take shape: an elite research university, housed within a science city, in his native Egypt. The fledgling organization, Zewail City of Science and Technology on the outskirts of Cairo, began admitting students to its university in 2013. “It’s really a beautiful story of hope and a new beginning for Egypt,” Zewail said this past April in an interview with Science. Last week, however, Zewail’s death at the age of 70 deprived the effort of its fundraiser-in-chief and most powerful advocate. Leaders of the project have vowed to press on with their plans to build a center for science and innovation in the Arab world. But some have concerns about keeping tuition costs low and completing fundraising goals. “There is a worry that if his name is not there, [fundraising] could be affected,” says Mostafa El-Sayed, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a member of Zewail City’s advisory council. “Let’s hope not.” Zewail, who was born in Egypt’s Nile delta but spent most of his career at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, first proposed the university in 1999. That was the year he won the chemistry Nobel Prize for pioneering the field of femtochemistry: using laser pulses as a stop action camera to track chemical reactions as they unfold. As the first Arab to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences, the naturalized U.S. citizen gained enormous prestige—serving, among other things, as the first U.S. science envoy to the Middle East aimed at improving U.S. relations with the Muslim world. It had always bothered Zewail that the best and brightest Egyptian students typically had to leave the country to advance their careers. He hoped that the creation of a top-flight research university would turn things around and lure expatriate Egyptian scientists back home. In 1999, he sketched out his ideas to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who initially embraced the plan. A key element of Zewail’s vision was difficult for Egypt’s autocratic leader to swallow, however. At most of the country’s research institutions, the federal government holds sway over university faculty hiring decisions and research funds. But Zewail wanted to promote an independent, merit-based scientific culture in Egypt. He insisted that the university be run by an independent board of trustees with complete authority over hiring and admission decisions. “This was very irritating to Mubarak,” Zewail recalled. Without the president’s backing, the project stalled. But shortly after Mubarak was ousted in the Egyptian revolution of 2011, interest in the project revived. Six months later, the Egyptian cabinet declared Zewail City for Science and Technology a national project. The city is designed to include teaching facilities for about 1000 students, seven thematic research institutes modeled on the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, and a technology transfer center aimed at propelling research advances into startup companies. In 2014, the Egyptian government gave the city 80 hectares for the campus and, a year later, said it would