Letter from Abu Dhabi: Ever since the spectacular success of Philip of Macedonia's initiative in hiring Aristotle to tutor his unruly son Alexander, kings and rulers have spared no expense in persuading the best brains to come and teach their offspring.
The tradition lives on in the minds of the present-day rulers of the United Arab Emirates, who have just concluded the first part of an extravagant and unusual educational experiment.
Last week 10 Nobel science laureates from Europe and the US, including the legendary US physicists, Murray Gell-Mann and Sheldon Glashow, and the chemist Kary Mullis, whose DNA research inspired Jurassic Park, were brought to the Emirates and installed in $6,000-a-night suites in the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi.
There they were joined by 10 other global luminaries including the Intel chief executive Craig Barret; the controversial Swedish environmentalist Björn Lomborg and Fidel Castro's son, also Fidel, a professor of physics at the Cuban Academy of Science.
The task of this talented and very busy group of men and women was to participate for five days in a intensive round of seminars with a hand-picked group of 200 undergraduate and postgraduate students drawn from across the Arab world.
The decision to hold the event, designed to stimulate postgraduate scientific and technical education in the Emirates, followed an approach to the ruling family of Abu Dhabi by an Irish-registered charitable foundation, the Edward de Bono Foundation.
De Bono, born in Malta and educated in the UK, is best known for the concept of "lateral thinking" which, he contends, is a skill that can be taught and which has valuable applications in all aspects of problem-solving, including scientific research. The project received the support of the Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed al Nahyan, and was awarded a generous budget.
The agenda was devised jointly by the UAE department of education and the de Bono foundation and dealt with some of the big practical issues of our day - population growth, global warming, energy production and environmental pollution.
In the event, the scientists found themselves answering more personal and particular questions about their views on religion, the role of science in the often difficult relationship between the West and the Arab world, and the future of the energy industry on which the great prosperity of all the economies of the region is based.
Each session began with a short formal statement to the plenary meeting by one of the laureates on the chosen theme. Many of them had come with the latest statistics, illustrating the extent of the problems and the starkness of the choices facing the global community. They were listened to by the students with the closest attention.
According to the UAE minister for education, Sheik al Nayahan, an expert committee will later this month begin a review of the value of the exercise. They will also prepare for a follow-up event in 2007.
According to the minister, the UAE wants to continue a dialogue between its third-level students and the best of the international scientific community.
The follow-up event is likely to include more Arab research scientists, most of whom currently work professionally in the West.
Many of the Nobel laureates, in their closing remarks, said they had found the exercise exhilarating. According to Prof Glashow, Nobel prizewinner in 1979 and one of the founders of modern theoretical physics, a clear message had come through that many Arab students wanted to be able to pursue scientific research in their own countries.
Earlier, in one of his formal presentations to the conference, he had spoken about the threat to the low-lying emirates from global warming and rising sea levels.
He also told the students of his personal belief that religion, in all its forms, had a "nefarious" influence, and that the "sacred duty" of scientists was curiosity.
Dr Burton Richter, director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre and a former president of the American Physical Society, spoke about the unsustainabilty of the current pattern of energy use. "Is there a greenhouse effect? You bet there is," he said.
"Should we be worried? The scientific community has been worried since 1970. If we continue with business as usual, average temperatures will climb by between two and five degrees Celsius by the end of the century." Fusion was 50 years off at the earliest, he said.
One of the most unusual contributions came from the DNA chemist, Prof Mullis, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1993. "Why have we heard nothing from outer space?" he asked. "We have been broadcasting for 80 years.
"A sphere of coherent radio communication 160 million light years in diameter surrounds our planet . . . By now it encompasses tens of thousands of stars and their planets.
"If our chemistry, physics and Darwinian evolution are right, then beings like us should have evolved on some of these planets. But we have heard nothing. Either our science is wrong, or beings like us always wipe themselves out."