Abdul Qadeer Khan - Early Life

Early Life

Khan was born in Bhopal, India (then British Indian Empire) into a Pashtun, but Urdu-speaking family in 1936. His father Dr. Abdul Ghafoor Khan was an academic who served in the Education Ministry of the British Indian Government and after retirement in 1935, settled permanently in Bhopal State. After the partition in 1947, the family emigrated from India to Pakistan, and settled in West-Pakistan. Khan studied in Saint Anthony's High School of Lahore, and then enrolled at the D.J. Science College of Karachi. There, he took his double BA degree in Physics and in Mathematics under the supervision of physicist Dr. Bashir Syed. In 1956, he attended Karachi University and obtained a B.S. degree in Metallurgy in 1960 and subsequently got the internship at the Siemens Engineering.

After the graduation, he was employed by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation and worked as an city inspector of weight and measures in Karachi, Pakistan. In 1961, he went to West Berlin to study Metallurgical engineering at the Technical University Berlin. In 1967, Qadeer Khan obtained an engineer's degree in technology from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and a doctorate engineering in Metallurgical engineering under the supervision of Martin Brabers from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1972. Qadeer Khan's doctoral dissertations were written in fluent German. His doctoral thesis dealt and contained the fundamental work in martensite, and its extended industrial applications to the field of Morphology, a field that studies the shape, size, texture and phase distribution of physical objects