[caption id="attachment_152636" align="alignright" width="190"] An Iranian woman walks down a street in Tehran, Iran. Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA[/caption]

In his Iranian new year message of March 2011, President Barack Obama pledged the US would “build new avenues for engagement with Iran’s youth, facilitate their ability to study in the United States, and allow Iran’s young people to better interact with the rest of the world”. This was followed by a more liberal US policy on visas for Iranian students and exchange visitors.

Nowhere was the breakthrough more marked than in science, leading some to speak of “science diplomacy”. In cooperation with its Iranian counterpart and with strong support from the US state department, the US National Academy of Sciences promoted engagement across science, engineering and health, organising trips of American Nobel Laureates and presidents of leading US universities to Iran, while the state department encouraged visits by Iranian scholars to scientific roundtables and gatherings in America.

Then, earlier this month came a bombshell. The University of Massachusetts in Amherst (UMass) announced it would bar Iranians from a range of engineering and natural science programmes.

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