Dangerous Fieldwork

We've known for a long time that scientific fieldwork can be dangerous. Roy Chapman Andrews was attacked by bandits for example. And for women, it's been publicly known for a few years now that there is massive harassment, by their scientific colleagues, in the field (and the lab, and the classroom, and the rest of academia. Yikes.).

But the foreign government allowing the research in the first place? They're not supposed to represent much of a physical danger. Yet here we have a researcher,  28 year-old Cambridge PhD student Giulio Regeni, who was apparently tortured and killed by the security apparatus of "President" Sisi in Egypt. Sisi came to power in what amounted to a counter-democratic coup. The longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak resigned after public protests over his reign, and Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood political party, was elected afterwards. The Egyptian military ultimately balked at this, initiated a coup, and used a tremendous amount of violence (killing more than 800 people in one instance) to suppress not only the Muslim Brotherhood but any dissent.

So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising to learn that they kidnapped him, burnt and tortured him, and ultimately killed him. In addition to the plain old evilness of this regime, it shows that the Sisi government is not really thinking about researchers in Egypt. It should be obvious that there's a tremendous amount of field and other research going on in the land of the Pharaohs & Fatimids. Also recall that the dinosaur Spinosaurus aegypticus was first discovered there, and that the Fayum is an amazing and important primate fossil site. There's a huge number of researchers there, in fact there's entire field schools that operate under this same government and security apparatus.