Gallieno Denardo describes the Centre's rapid development in the 1980s---a decade of explosive growth that, in many ways, transformed ICTP into what it is today.

Ideals and Realities in the 1980s

The glory that the Nobel Prize brings to its recipients also brightens the reputation of the institutions for which they work.
But those institutions are usually already well-known throughout the world---the likes of Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford universities. As a result, it's usually the newly minted laureates who gain lasting star status not only among scientists but the public at large.
In the case of Abdus Salam and ICTP, however, the impact of the Nobel Prize boosted the institution as much as and, in fact, even more than the individual.
Abdus Salam received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979, which he shared with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for their theoretical unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces.
The recognition afforded by the prize not only represented a personal triumph for Salam but a boon to the prestige of ICTP and a primary force that soon elevated the Centre to new heights.
In the late 1970s, the Centre operated on an annual budget of US$1.8 million---not much higher in real terms than a decade before.
Spurred by the enthusiasm for the Centre expressed by its foreign minister Giulio Andreotti, an enthusiasm that became even more intense after Abdus Salam won the Nobel Prize, Italy initially decided to raise its annual contributions to ICTP to US$7.3 million. The announcement took place at the ICTP Commemorative Meeting on 'The Next Twenty Years in Plasma Physics' held in Trieste in September 1984. By the end of the decade, ICTP's budget would exceed US$13 million with funding not only from the Italian government but also from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
This boost in funding meant that the Centre would never be the same.
Not only was ICTP able to greatly expand its core research and training activities in high energy physics, condensed matter physics and mathematics, but it was also able to embrace new subfields and to develop new capacity building strategies that substantially broadened the scope and range of its activities.
Workshops and conferences, for example, in radiopropagation, geophysics, cloud physics and microelectronics were all organised for the first time during this decade, setting the stage for the creation of the Aeronomy and Radiopropagation Laboratory, the SAND (Structure and Nonlinear Dynamics of the Earth) group, and the ICTP-INFN (Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics) Microprocessor Laboratory. ICTP activities in optics, medical physics, soil physics and a host of other areas all received their start in the 1980s.
In the 1970s, ICTP organised fewer than 15 research and training activities each year. In the 1980s, the annual number of Centre-sponsored research and training activities nearly tripled to 40. In the 1970s, about 1500 visitors on average came to ICTP each year. In the 1980s, the average number of visitors stood at 4000 a year---again virtually a threefold increase.
As the level of activities and the number of scientists participating in ICTP activities rose, the Centre had to take a number of significant logistical steps to accommodate these changes. There was a dramatic growth in staff, which increased from 20 in 1980 to 120 in 1989. With additional help from Italian authorities, ICTP doubled the size of the Main Building through a construction project that began in 1984; occupied the Galileo Guesthouse in 1982; and signed a long-term lease for the Adriatico Guesthouse in 1985. Miramare train station was re-opened in 1987 to accommodate the increased flow of staff and visitors.
Before the 1980s, all ICTP research and training activities took place on the Miramare campus. But now the Centre was ready to 'export' its successful strategies to the developing world---and parts of the developing world were ready to receive them. The infusion of additional resources, of course, provided ICTP with an opportunity to pursue this goal but it was the ad hoc advisory committee's recommendation for "the Centre to operationalise activities in developing countries," issued in 1983, that provided the rationale for such endeavours.
To help advance its overall outreach strategy, ICTP first turned to its closest scientific neighbours---the Italian research laboratories---and it did so by creating the Training and Research in Italian Laboratories (TRIL) programme in 1983.
Three primary principles lay behind the birth of the TRIL programme. First, it enabled ICTP to tap the expertise and facilities found in Italy's network of laboratories, allowing the Centre to extend its reach well beyond the research and training activities offered at ICTP. Second, TRIL provided opportunities for scientists from the developing world to engage in experimental and applied physics, a choice not readily available on the Miramare campus where the focus remained largely on theoretical studies. And third, TRIL enabled the Centre to strengthen its ties with scientific institutions in Italy in ways that would benefit both ICTP and its host country. Over the past two decades, some 1000 scientists from the developing world have participated in the TRIL programme, and more than 330 Italian scientific institutions have partnered with ICTP in this effort.
TRIL, however, still confined the Centre's capacity-building strategies to Northern institutions. One of the most fundamental shifts in ICTP's method of operation took place in 1985 with the creation of the Office of External Activities (OEA), which seeks to help scientists in the developing world forge their own research and training agendas by developing research and training activities within their own countries. To advance this goal, OEA has financed the creation of affiliated centres and networks, organised visiting scholars' programmes, and funded workshops and conferences. The point is that all of these activities have taken place 'there' and not 'here,' and that all are designed to have scientists from the developing world assume the lead in the programmes' development and implementation. Over the past two decades, more than 40 affiliated centres and networks have been established, among them the Lasers, Atomic and Molecular Physics (LAMP) Network in Dakar, Senegal, for the African countries, and the Multiple Optical Network (MON), based in La Plata, Argentina, for Latin-American countries.
At the same time, the 1980s, largely as a result of the growing reputation and visibility of ICTP, witnessed the creation of an expanding Trieste-based nexus of international scientific research and training centres that ultimately came to be called the Trieste System.
These institutions include TWAS (the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World) and the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), both created in 1983, and the International Centre for Science and High Technology (ICS), which was created in 1988. The latter operates under the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).
The 1980s proved to be a stimulating and productive decade, one in which the Centre's programmes were vastly expanded.
All in all, the 1980s were a decade that saw Salam's noble ideals turn into Nobel realities.

Gallieno Denardo
Former Head, ICTP Office of External Activities

ICTP IN THE '80s

1980
First workshop on earthquake processes

1981
First college on microprocessors

1982
ICTP Prize created
Galileo Guesthouse opens
First college on biophysics
First meeting on applications of physics to medicine and biology
First course on mathematical ecology

1983
TWAS established
TRIL programme begins
First college on soil physics

1984 ­ 20th anniversary
Expansion of Main Building
Books and Equipment Donation programme launched
Carlo Rubbia wins Nobel Prize for confirming experimentally Abdus Salam's theory
First college on troposphere, stratosphere and mesosphere

1985
Italian contribution increases to US$7.3 million
ICTP Dirac Medal established
Office of External Activities established
ICTP-INFN Microprocessor Laboratory established
Renting of Adriatico Guesthouse begins
First workshop on cloud physics and climate

1986
Mathematics research group established
Adriatico Research Conferences expand training and research in condensed matter physics
First conference on synchrotron radiation

1987
High Temperature Superconductivity laboratory opens

1988
Abdus Salam proposes creation of International Centre for Sciences (ICS)
Creation of Third World Network of Scientific Organizations (TWNSO) and Third World Organization for Women in Science (TWOWS)

1989 ­ 25th anniversary
First Staff Associates appointed
Scientific Computer section installs mini-supercomputer
Italian contribution reaches US$13.5 million

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