For an Iranian scientist, a visa ordeal and a question: Is a coveted U.S. lab job worth being separated from his family?
The Iranian pharmacologist was exactly where he wanted to be: in a windowless, acrid-smelling room on the 12th floor of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, delicately suctioning pink liquid from a dish of cells. His mind was elsewhere, though.
One moment, Soheil Saeedi was here, in Boston, pipetting chemicals, trying to figure out why a molecule went from cardiovascular boon to burden, and the next he was back in Iran with his wife, wandering in the shade of her father’s kiwi orchard. He’d be jotting calculations on a paper towel when suddenly he’d remember her face. That was enough to set him adrift, to remind him yet again that for seven months they’d only been able to see each other through a screen; that for seven months, theirs had been a marriage by smartphone.
“Skype, WhatsApp — this is not real life,” he said.
They’d already been in limbo once, in 2017, during President Trump’s initial travel ban. It had taken eight months for the courts to block that executive order and for the couple’s visas to come through, so that Saeedi — who’d been an assistant professor and pharmaceutical CEO back in Iran — could start his fellowship in the United States.
Since then, the Trump administration has explicitly allowed Iranian researchers like Saeedi to enter the country with their families to
