Edward Norton's Fundraiser for 'the Scientist' Refaai Hamo

Edward Norton's Fundraiser Inspired by a Syrian Scientist's Story

In December 2015 the actor Edward Norton started an online fundraiser for a Syrian refugee known to millions of readers only as “the Scientist”, a man profiled by the photo blog Humans of New York who had lost his wife and a daughter when a missile struck his family home. Within days the campaign had passed $400,000, and by January 2016 it had raised more than $450,000. The man, later named as Dr. Refaai Hamo, arrived in Michigan with four of his children a few days before Christmas, and a month later he sat in the gallery for President Obama’s final State of the Union address.

Here is how a single blog post turned into one of the best-known refugee stories of that winter, what happened to the family afterwards, and why the episode still matters.

The man behind “the Scientist” posts

Humans of New York, usually shortened to HONY, was started in 2010 by the American photographer Brandon Stanton. It began as street portraits of New Yorkers paired with short quotes from them, and grew into a vast social media project followed by tens of millions of people. In 2015 Stanton worked with the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, photographing people who had fled war zones, and in December he published a run of stories about Syrian families who had been accepted for resettlement in the United States.

One of those stories, told over seven posts, was Hamo’s. He described himself as a scientist and inventor who had studied for his doctorate in Damascus while paying his way with night shifts on building sites. He had married a fellow student, a woman studying law, and they had raised a family. Then the civil war reached them. A missile hit the family compound, killing his wife, one of his daughters, his brother and several other relatives.

He fled to Turkey with his surviving son and three daughters. There, as a refugee, he could not work legally or get proper medical care, and he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. In one of the posts he summed up the damage in a line that many readers quoted back: “We survived but we’re dead psychologically.”

Edward Norton was inspired by a story he saw on Humans of New York.

The series showed him at home with his children, talking not only about grief but also about the ideas and designs he still wanted to build. That mix of loss and stubborn ambition is what made readers stop scrolling.

How Edward Norton’s fundraiser took off

Norton, then 46, said the story moved him to tears. He set up a campaign for the family on CrowdRise, a charity fundraising site he had co-founded, and shared it with his followers. The early numbers climbed fast: about $130,000 within the first day or so, more than $341,000 by the following Sunday, and close to $400,000 within a week, as reported at the time by ABC, Entertainment Weekly and others.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available.)

Norton was explicit that he saw the fundraiser as a reply to the political mood of the moment. Urging people to give, he wrote: “Let’s reject the ‘anti-human’ voices that tell us to fear refugees.” He said the money would cover the father’s medical treatment, help him continue his work and let the family build a stable new life.

The posts also reached the White House. President Barack Obama replied on Facebook, welcoming Hamo and telling him he was “part of what makes America great.” Thousands of HONY readers shared the story, many of them adding their own family histories of immigration.

The political backdrop in late 2015

The timing explains why the story landed so hard. After the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015, more than half of US state governors said they would try to block or pause the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their states, and Congress debated tougher screening rules. Michigan’s governor at the time, Rick Snyder, was among the first to call for a pause.

Hamo was headed for Troy, a suburb of Detroit in Oakland County, Michigan. Local officials told reporters they had not been told of his arrival in advance, which is normal: refugee resettlement in the US is run by the federal government with national agencies and local charities, not by city councils.

Against that background, a detailed, humanising portrait of one Syrian father did something statistics could not. It gave a face to a group that was being discussed mainly as a security risk.

Arrival in Michigan and the State of the Union

Hamo landed at Detroit Metropolitan Airport late on the night of 17 December 2015 with his son and three daughters. Speaking to reporters afterwards, he said he wanted to be a good citizen in his new country and shrugged off those who opposed refugees as having their own business to attend to.

On 12 January 2016 he was a guest of First Lady Michelle Obama at the State of the Union address in Washington, seated as a representative of the many Syrians seeking safety. By then the fundraiser had passed $450,000, according to FOX 2 Detroit, with most of the money intended for his cancer treatment.

What happened next

Michigan Public radio caught up with Hamo in March 2017. He had settled in Oakland County, was working in a modest lab on several projects despite limited resources, including research on predicting earthquakes and reducing their damage, and said his family was adjusting, even though memories of the war were still painful. He had also attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier that year.

His story is a reminder of a few things that often get lost in debates about refugees:

Resettled refugees are screened before they travel. Families like Hamo’s typically wait a year or more in a first country of refuge, such as Turkey, while their cases are reviewed.
Many arrive with skills. Doctors, engineers and scientists are among those who flee wars, but they often cannot work in the country where they first find safety.
Health care is a major barrier. Hamo’s cancer went largely untreated in Turkey because his status kept him out of the system.

Why one story moved so many people

Psychologists sometimes call it the identifiable victim effect: people respond more generously to one named person with a clear story than to large numbers. Stanton’s format, a photograph and the subject’s own words, makes use of exactly that. Norton supplied the second ingredient, a simple way to act, and the internet did the rest.

The risk of the format is that one family gets help while millions in similar situations do not. The upside is that stories like this one can change how readers picture a whole group of people. In the winter of 2015, at a moment of fear, a scientist from Damascus and his four children briefly became the face of Syria’s refugees for many Americans.

If the story makes you want to help, established organisations such as UNHCR and local refugee resettlement agencies work with families like the Hamos every day, long after the headlines fade.

Sources: Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton (original series and photographs); FOX 2 Detroit: Syrian scientist featured on HONY arrives in Troy; FOX 2 Detroit: Syrian refugee among First Lady’s guests; Michigan Public: “The Scientist” arrives in Michigan (2015); Michigan Public: What happened to Dr. Rafaai Hamo (2017); Wikipedia: Humans of New York; People; ABC News; Entertainment Weekly; photo of the family via Daily Mail.