As war escalates, Iran’s universities face increasing fire

On the morning of 2 April, an explosion ripped through the Pasteur Institute of Iran, the country’s leading public health research center, obliterating key labs and biological collections. “Miraculously, no member of our staff was harmed” in the attack, Pasteur’s director, epidemiologist Ehsan Mostafavi, told Science. It appears, he adds, that no pathogens escaped from the facility, which is located in the heart of Tehran. As U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran enter their sixth week, the nation’s academic institutions are increasingly under fire. The Pasteur blast was the institute’s third—and most destructive so far. An attack today on Iran’s prestigious Sharif University of Technology in Tehran seriously damaged its engineering departments and institutes for nanoscience and environmental science, along with its computer systems. A few days earlier, a missile struck the plasma and laser research lab at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, which has been linked to Iran’s nuclear program. Earlier barrages, including collateral damage from strikes on nearby military installations, hit the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), also in Tehran, the Ilam University of Medical Sciences, and the Isfahan University of Technology. In mid-March, explosions destroyed the Iranian Space Research Center in Tehran—its work was relevant to ballistic missile development—and damaged a dormitory at Persian Gulf University in Busheher. The war is also crippling institutions that have so far escaped attacks. Across Iran, “Graduate students are locked out of labs and dormitories, while widespread internet blackouts have paralyzed research, leaving scholars unable to access email or manage peer-revew submissions,” says Hossein Akhani, a biologist at the University of Tehran. If the United States follows through on threats to wreck Iran’s power grid, he warns, that would jeopardize specimen collections. “We face the potential loss of irreplaceable scientific heritage.” Israel now appears to be casting a wider lethal net in its yearslong campaign of assassinating Iranian scientists. In recent days, at least two scientists were slain in separate strikes: IUST electrical engineer Saeed Shamghadri, allegedly involved in Iran’s missile program, and Ali Fouladvand, research chief for Iran’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, which Iranian media have compared to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And early last week, a pharmaceutical company became a target for the first time. Israeli forces struck the Tofigh Daru Research & Engineering Company in Tehran, “destroying its production lines,” says deputy health minister Shahin Akhondzadeh, a psychiatry professor at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed the firm made fentanyl for a chemical weapons program. Akhondzadeh asserts it is a purely civilian enterprise. For Iranian science, the attack on Pasteur, Iran’s highest profile research center, is “the biggest tragedy of this war so far,” Akhondzadeh says. The Pasteur Institute in Paris established the center in 1920, after the 1918–19 Spanish flu pandemic. It conducted disease surveillance and produced vaccines against rabies, smallpox, and other diseases. In 1946, in an amicable split, Iran’s government took over the Tehran branch, which continued to collaborate with its Paris parent. In recent years, Pasteur has run a national reference center for cholera, tuberculosis, and other diseases. It produces vaccines against hepatitis B, measles, and COVID-19. And it is a member of the Pasteur Network, an alliance of 32 institutes around the world that share early warning data about outbreaks. Few scientists were at work because the attack took place on Nature Day, the end of the 2-week Nowruz holiday. But the material toll was high: The institute lost national reference labs, World Health Organization collaborating centers for rabies and for vector-borne diseases, its virology lab and vaccination unit, and collections of tissue samples and recombinant strains of bacteria and viruses. It was “infrastructure that had taken decades of effort to establish and equip,” Mostafavi says. So far, he says, poststrike monitoring has shown “no microbiological or biohazard” threat. It remains unclear who was responsible for the assault on Pasteur—or why. One possible reason is suspicion about its involvement in biological weapon (BW) research. In a 2025 report, the U.S. Department of State alleged that “Iran maintains flexibility to use, upon leadership demand, legitimate research underway for biodefense and public health purposes for a capability to produce lethal BW agents.” The report did not identify specific facilities. Israeli nonproliferation analysts have voiced similar concerns; IDF did not respond to a request for comment. Akhondzadeh rejects those suspicions. “I say strongly there is no relationship between the Iranian army and the Pasteur Institute.” Geography may have played a role in the targeting. Pasteur is a short walk from Leadership House, the office of Iran’s supreme leader, and “there is a strong possibility” that secret tunnels run beneath the institute, says Masoud Mozafari, an Iran-born biomedical engineer at the University of Oulu. Mostafavi declined to speculate “whether the damage to the Pasteur was intentional.” Mostafavi says Pasteur will use satellite branches to continue to provide diagnostic services, vaccinations, and coordination of Iran’s public health laboratories. But the loss of its core facilities has left many of its top scientists adrift, he says. “Once conditions stabilize, we will rebuild this institution,” he vows. “And, God willing, make it better than before.”