Atta ur Rahman

Atta ur Rahman was born in 1942 in New Delhi, British India, and migrated to Pakistan following partition. He pursued his early education in Karachi before earning his PhD from Cambridge University in 1968 under the supervision of Lord Alexander Todd, a Nobel laureate. This formative experience at one of the world's leading institutions gave him both the skills and ambition to transform scientific research in Pakistan.

Returning to Pakistan, Atta ur Rahman joined the University of Karachi, where he would spend most of his career building one of the most productive chemistry research groups in the developing world. He specialised in the chemistry of natural products, particularly the isolation and structural elucidation of alkaloids from medicinal plants. Over decades, he and his team characterised hundreds of new natural compounds, many with potential pharmaceutical applications.

Beyond the laboratory, Atta ur Rahman became the most influential science administrator Pakistan has ever produced. As Chairman of the Higher Education Commission and Federal Minister for Science and Technology, he oversaw the establishment of hundreds of new universities and dramatically increased the number of Pakistani PhD holders studying abroad. He championed investment in research infrastructure and international collaboration at a time when Pakistani science was severely underfunded.

His publication record is extraordinary: he has authored or co-authored over 1,300 research papers and more than 140 books on organic chemistry and natural products. He has received Pakistan's highest civilian honours as well as international recognition from UNESCO, the Islamic Development Bank, and numerous academies of science across the Muslim world.

Atta ur Rahman's legacy lies not only in his scientific discoveries but in his relentless institution-building, which gave generations of Pakistani scientists opportunities that did not exist before him.