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U.S. Science Policy Delegation to Meet With Cuban Officials
November 10, 2009Peter C. Agre, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a Nobel laureate in chemistry, is among the members of a non-governmental American delegation that will visit Cuba for some science diplomacy on Nov. 10-13. The visit includes meetings with leading Cuban scientists and policy officials. It is meant to explore research issues and multilateral science venues that might be conducive to U.S.-Cuba scientific cooperation. The trip comes at a time when scientists in the United States and in Cuba have been urging expanded scientific cooperation between the two nations. In an Oct. 17, 2008 editorial in the journal Science, Michael Clegg, the foreign secretary of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and Sergio Jorge Pastrana, foreign secretary of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, noted that the U.S. embargo on exchanges with Cuba, established in 1961, continues to hamper scientific cooperation. They called for a new framework for cooperation and urged that the present U.S. license permitting restricted travel to Cuba be expanded to allow direct cooperation in research. President Barack Obama has said he wants to end five decades of bitterness between the two nations. Full release.