I wish someone told me not to get off the car when stopped by a cop as a sign of respect for them.
I wish someone told me not to pick up random kids in the park and kiss them on the cheeks like we do on Morocco without being considered psychos.
In this stunning work of historical fiction, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of Americaa Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record.
After receiving a bachelor degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Sciences at Fes, Morocco, Dr M. Maftahi went to France where he obtained his D.E.A. in Microbiology at the Pasteur Institute of Paris where he was studying prokaryotic viruses. In 1997 M. Maftahi obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in Microbiology. During his years of scientific education and training he became proficient with molecular biological and biochemical techniques. In his thesis work he was also involved in the yeast genome project where he sequenced and characterized several genes. He developed a new technique to "knock out" genes to study their functions, and has published several articles on these topics.