Silk Inroad

Around 105 B.C., Parthia, a former empire on the Iranian plateau, exchanged embassies with China, inaugurating bilateral trade along the Silk Road. Two millennia later, NATO is installing the Virtual Silk Highway Project (VSHP) (www.silkproject.org) — an ambitious $10.5 million, high-speed, satellite-based, broadband computer network in universities throughout Central Asia. Why undertake such a project? "It is inconceivable for a modern university to be aware of what is happening elsewhere without the Internet," says Peter Kirstein, chair of the London-based Silk Board.

In Uzbekistan, for instance, VSHP has increased broadband access 26-fold, thanks to 2,500 computers the project donated to universities and other educational facilities across the country. Tashkent University now offers a distance-learning class taught by professors at Wageningen University in Holland — a major accomplishment considering that, as recently as a year ago, videoconferences, online panel discussions, and scientific peer reviews were unimaginable. A planned VSHP uplink for Central Asian University, (www.ucentralasia.org), a private regional university with a campus in Tajikistan, could result in the virtual exchange of research and ideas that trump the region’s actual trade in goods to commerce centers such as Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. To be sure, much of Central Asia remains impoverished and remote. But the new initiative may allow scientific and technological advances to travel along the ancient route long before global cultural or economic forces do.