quite violent. I had thought that maybe you had been there and had actual knowledge of the place. It still would have been interesting to know what you thought of the city and any of the countryside had you traveled there (especially had you been to Gerasa which you may have found quite interesting), knew its history, or talked with people thereabouts.
Of course, it absolutely goes without saying that war is a terrible thing for all the people in that region of the world and for people generally too.
Were you to want his biographical information, The Washington Post offered that the other day. It seems more in depth than the Wikipedia search (re: Jordan, etc.) that you had suggested:
A long ‘journey’ for Nobel chemistry winner born to Palestinian refugees
Omar Yaghi, 60, a U.S. citizen born in Jordan, says he was raised with a dozen others in one room.
...
He was born into a family of refugees, he told the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded him the Nobel Prize in chemistry for groundbreaking work in molecular architecture, along with collaborators Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson. “My parents could barely read or write.”
Yaghi
grew up in Amman, Jordan, where his parents moved after fleeing Gaza in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians took flight or were forced from their homes amid sectarian fighting in what would soon become Israel. “We were a dozen of us in one small room, sharing it with the cattle that we used to raise,” he said.
Yaghi first saw a “stick and ball” diagram of molecules at a public library in Amman, Jordan’s capital, when he was 10. He said he was immediately drawn to them and only later “learned that these were molecules that make up our world.”
At age 15, Yaghi moved to Troy, New York. He studied English at a community college before transferring to the University at Albany in 1983.
...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/10/08/nobel-prize-palestinian-omar-yaghi-chemistry/
All in all, that is a pretty remarkable trajectory.
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