Renowned Inventor Hourani Honored Memorial Resident Receives “Award of Excellence”
I
by the Honorable Philip Berquist, Honorary Consul for the Republic of Croatia
n a recent article on a trip to Washington, D.C. I attended a celebration of the life of retiring Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. The lavish affair was hosted by Houstonian Monzer Hourani, Hatch’s close friend of many years. It was a spectacle including a luncheon and dinner followed by a concert at the venerable Kennedy Center featuring the orchestra and choir of the University of Houston, conducted at times by Hourani himself! The concert was originally planned to be in the National Cathedral but the unexpected death of former President George H.W. Bush on the Friday prior caused the concert to be moved to the Kennedy Center. Hourani is a renowned inventor, engineer, scientist, entrepreneur and architect known for building state of the art medical facilities throughout the country. This article attempts to be an important update on Mr. Hourani. When we burn a piece of toast our natural reaction is to simply discard the ruined breakfast, or perhaps even try scraping off the charred residue in an attempt to salvage the poor slice. As it turns out, Monzer Hourani found his burned toast as the inspiration for perhaps the most important scientific invention of our time. In March of 2020, near the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Hourani’s housekeeper had put some cheese on a slice of bread and placed it in the kitchen toaster for part of his breakfast. She went on to do some household chores, forgetting about the bread. Hourani smelled smoke and found the toaster smoking with the cheese bread on fire. Hourani did not try to salvage his breakfast. Using his natural curiosity, he considered that very high heat could indeed possibly destroy airborne diseases and pathogens, potentially including 12 | Mv | July + August 2021
Covid-19. This curiosity led him to imagine how a high-heat device (100 degrees Celsius / 212 degrees Fahrenheit) might be used to be placed in normal HVAC air conditioning units that would create extremely high temperatures to capture foreign elements in the air immediately prior to the device being cooled to allow the resulting air to be run through the air conditioning unit. This was not the first important invention by Hourani. Following the oil spill of the Exxon Valdez he invented a device to assist in cleanup of that disaster and future oil spills. He also was concerned by the seemingly inability of the reliability of windows surviving hurricane winds. This resulted in his invention to brace windows in such horrific storms that has now been widely implemented. Hourani brought his latest theory to the University of Houston, specially to Dr. Zhifeng Ren, the Director of the Su-
perconductivity Center of Texas and Dr. Paul Chu, the Founding Director and Chief Scientist at the Center and they immediately went to work with Hourani. They were joined by the UTMB Galveston National Lab and the Texas A&M Engineering and Experiment Station in College Station. The result is the “Biodefense Air Protection SystemTM” which has been proven through numerous trials to eliminate 99.9999% of SARS-CoV2, (Covid-19) and 99.98% of anthrax! A new Houston corporation, Integrated Viral Protection (IVP), was created to produce and market the invention. After the initial HVAC system was developed several mobile devices were created as well. Mind you that the toast was burned in March, 2020 and his devices were available in September 2020! Hourani was honored on Thursday, April 8, 2021, by the Engineering News Record, a publication regarding engi-
