Stateless scientist sets sights on Covid vaccine

LONDON: Ask scientist Nowras Rahhal about his cutting-edge work on a Covid-19 vaccine and he is eager to explain the complexities but ask him where he comes from and he struggles for words.

Rahhal, who moved to Germany two years ago from Syria’s war-shattered capital Damascus, is stateless.

“When you are stateless, the simple question ‘ Where are you from?’ becomes very loaded,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Most people are happy to say where they belong but I don’t know what to answer. I’d love to have a place to call home.”

“When you look at your ID and you see you are an ‘ undefined person’ it’s really painful,” he said.

“If I say I’m stateless, I worry if people will think I’ve done something so bad in life that I’ve had my nationality taken away,” he added.

Rahhal, 27, has just finished working with a team at one of the Max Planck institutes on developing a system allowing a Covid-19 vaccine to be applied to the skin, rather than injected into muscle.

He said the technique, targeting specialist immune cells in the skin that can trigger an immune reaction in the body, would require a far smaller dose per person, a big advantage when inoculating large populations.

Before arriving in Germany, Rahhal spent years studying to the sound of bombings and artillery fire, using his phone torch to read when the electricity was cut out at his home.

But Rahhal’s academic achievements are remarkable.

Rahhal’s grandfather was among tens of thousands of Palestinians who fled the city of Haifa during conflict surrounding the birth of Israel in 1948.