Today’s Boston Globe traces the history of many of the 35 Iranian students who in 1975 came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for training as nuclear scientists — at a time when the U.S. government thought that developing nuclear power in Iran was a good idea.

A generation later, after an Islamic revolution turned the country from an ardent ally to a bitter foe, some of those MIT-trained scientists are helping Iran’s nascent nuclear program and, some say, its development of nuclear weapons. A few of the scientists have died, including one said to have been executed in Iran for political crimes.

But most of the scientists — nearly two-thirds of them, by the Globe’s count — have remained in the United States, working for defense contractors or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.