Literary Overview: Rana Dajani’s Five Scarves: Doing the Impossible — If We Can Reverse Cell Fate, Why Can’t We Redefine Success?

In today’s landscape, many prominent researchers have studied the intersections between gender, race, and religion, as a means to work towards diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across disciplines. To this point, there are several books that break down these factors through comprehensive methodology combined with thoughtful insights formed through life experience. One such book, distributed by Nova Publishers, is Rana Dajani’s Five Scarves: Doing the Impossible — If We Can Reverse Cell Fate, Why Can’t We Redefine Success? Here, Nova Science Publishers review a brief overview of the book as well as its author.

Overview of Five Scarves: Doing the Impossible — If We Can Reverse Cell Fate, Why Can’t We Redefine Success?

Rana Dajani’s book explores the intersections of gender, race, religion, and science through the lens of one of the world’s most prominent Muslim women scientists. Five Scarves: Doing the Impossible — If We Can Reverse Cell Fate, Why Can’t We Redefine Success? is notable for chronicling Dajani’s life journey as she continued on the path to become an accomplished scientist and professor. Through her insights on her career and life journey, Dajani speaks to how she wears five scarves as a teacher, scientist, mother, social entrepreneur, and feminist, as well as the relationship between these aspects of her identity. Her writing draws parallels to scientists Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi’s discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that allowed researchers to reverse engineer embryonic life forms in 2006 and potential breakthroughs in gender equality, upholding that support of all women will require a similarly innovative, radical societal transformation of our cultures, customs, and institutions.

Readers note that Rana Dajani eloquently bridges her various life ranging from experiences at Jordan’s institutions and refugee camps to the halls of Cambridge, Harvard, the UN, and Grenoble to provide hard hitting insights on the fight for an equitable society. Much like the groundbreaking scientific discovery discussed by Dajani, the key to a more equal and human society may already be with us — but much work needs to be done on our parts to put the pieces together.

About Rana Dajani

Rana Dajani is a Palestinian-Jordanian molecular biologist who is recognized as one of the world’s leading Muslim women scientists. Rana earned her PhD in molecular biology at the University of Iowa and is currently a professor of biology and biotechnology at Hashemite University in Jordan, where she specializes in research on genome-wide association studies concerning cancer and diabetes on stem cells. Dajani often notes that her career is “not a straight line, but a zigzag of priorities and opportunities” and, through her work and other endeavors, she remains a proponent of raising health, social status, and social status of women and children in the Middle East.