Good morning everyone.

Thank you. I am honoured to be here and to be able to participate in this initiative organised by the Italian Scientists Association (ISA). My thanks go to ISA President Professor Uricchio, to Monica Maggioni for being with us this morning, and to all members of the Association for organising this initiative and for also choosing to invite the President of the Council of Ministers. I also wish to greet Minister Bernini and Minister Schillaci, Undersecretary of State Mantovano, President of INPS [National Social Security Institute] Fava (who is also our host here), President of INAIL [National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work] D’Ascenzo, President of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità [Italian National Health Institute] Bellantone, President of the CNR [National Research Council] Carrozza and the CRUI [Conference of Italian University Rectors] as well as all Rectors and all representatives of national research institutes present.
That was clearly a long list, but when you have an audience of this calibre, it is worth talking about. I obviously also wish to greet and thank Alberto Angela for attending, but also for his extremely important work in popularising science. This is one of the many things that science and politics have in common: they are complex subjects and, if you cannot make most people understand them, then they ultimately remain confined to a sphere that is not their own. The ability to raise awareness on these subjects is therefore also very important.

That said, I consider this science manifesto, promoted and drawn up by the Association, to be an extremely valuable document, as indeed is always the case when work is produced by an association representing over 500 full professors and top scientists. In my view, this document contains very many key insights for the work that politics has to do and it is therefore also obviously a document that the Government intends to make the most of. I am firmly convinced, and I believe I share this conviction with the Association, that it is necessary to once again focus on dialogue between the men and women of science on the one hand and institutions on the other, especially considering the times we are facing, which are times of copious, extremely complex challenges.

Clearly, the complexity of advanced societies in particular requires awareness, a pragmatic approach, a concrete approach, it requires study and analysis, and this is only possible if we are able to seriously re-establish an alliance between the world of the institutions, so the world of politics, and the world of science.

Our Constitution states that politics and science are free, and it could not be otherwise, but freedom, as always, imposes and comes with responsibility. Being the free men and women we are, we are called upon, each of course in their own field and in their own role, to make every effort to pursue the goal that ultimately unites us all, which is the one that Alberto Angela mentioned: to guarantee a better future for our children and, along with it, to guarantee a better future for our nation.

This is a job that we can and I believe we must do together because, on the one hand, politicians cannot do without scientists’ specialised expertise, their specific knowledge and the data that comes from their research, in order to exercise their decision-making power with all the elements and awareness they need to be discerning. At the same time, scientists need political decision-makers in order to plan their research goals within a broader context and an institutional framework, in order to thereby allow the results of their work to be made available to all, which in the end is every scientist’s goal.

We are therefore essentially talking about two fields that are distinct but incredibly complementary: on the one hand, there is the legitimacy of scientific expertise and, on the other, the legitimacy of political representation; on the one hand, there is the objectivity of the scientific method and, on the other, choosing the values and implementing the ethics of responsibility.
While, on the one hand, politics without the support of scientific expertise risks falling into demagogy, on the other hand, technical and scientific expertise without political order and ethical principles risks descending into technocracy.

I believe that, in order to avoid these risks, science and politics must recognise each other's role and be allies in the pursuit of the common good.

The great Saint, Pope John Paul II, began one of his most famous encyclicals, “Fides et Ratio”, with the words “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth”. I am convinced that politics and science are just like faith and reason: two wings with which man can take flight and build the common good; however, for man to be able to fly, those two wings must be able to move together, they must be able to move in a coordinated manner.

We know that this has not always been the case. We know that, throughout history, those two wings have not always moved in the same direction. On the contrary, we know that they have often clashed, due to the desire to dominate that each has at times tried to exert over the other. There have been times when politics has enslaved science, turning it into an ideological instrument with inhumane and heinous results; there have been times when science has idolised itself, believing itself to be above everything, demanding a world in which everything that was scientifically possible must automatically also be permissible.
This is why I believe we must instead follow the direction of dialogue. The first level of that dialogue is ethical in nature, with ethics being the fundamental prerequisite for establishing a kind of guardrail, which is crucial to steer both in the same direction.

Not everything that is technically possible is thus also ethically permissible. This is something else we have seen many times before. There is a very recent film that tells this story very well; this very successful film (many of you will have seen it) is dedicated to the life of Robert Oppenheimer, one of the 'fathers' of the atomic bomb. That film covers many of the issues we are discussing today, issues that come up in all scientists’ lives: on the one hand, there is the ambition of knowledge, but then there also questions about how to use the power that can derive from that knowledge, and the anguish of the responsibility that that knowledge inevitably brings. I imagine these are problems that many, including many of you, have asked themselves about at some point in their lives, but I also believe they are problems that scientists cannot and must not face alone; they can and must face these problems together with those who are then responsible for making the choices, which is precisely politics.

One of the most famous cases involving the relationship between science, ethics and politics comes to mind: the great debate surrounding the cloning of Dolly the sheep. On the one hand, science told us that it was possible to clone a living being; on the other hand, politics set ethical barriers, also by discussing with the scientific community, and said no to human reproductive cloning, i.e. to the possibility of being able to create a human being that is genetically identical to another, a scenario that would have been entirely new.

It has happened in the past, it will clearly happen again, and in this regard all the scenarios we are facing come to mind. I am above all thinking of the scenarios connected to the greatest revolution of our time: generative artificial intelligence. Generative artificial intelligence is opening up scenarios that we are being called upon to deal with and deal with much more quickly than we are today, in this case I am talking above all about politics. We have been accustomed to progress whose goal was always to support humans, to optimise human skills, but that progress essentially focused on replacing physical labour and allowing people to move forward and concentrate, for example, on organisational and concept-based work. Humans remained at the centre of this process.

Today, this risks no longer being the case. Generative artificial intelligence changes the whole scenario, because today it is intellect that can be replaced, and people inevitably run the risk of finding themselves in a world in which they are no longer at the centre, because what was stopping human beings from being replaced by machines in the past was the fact that it was impossible to replace intellect. This is a major issue, and is not the only issue concerning the risks associated with artificial intelligence, which obviously also has enormous opportunities.

I am also thinking of the increasing difficulty in distinguishing between what is true and what is not, with all the consequences this can have on decision-making processes, democratic systems and global balances. Deep fakes are the most well-known example and the general public have become familiar with this, but we know that there are many other risks, because the way we do things is changing all the time, often without us really realising it.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, I sometimes get the impression that, without realising it, we are trading our freedom for convenience. By the time we realise this, it may be too late. I do not want to say that technology, this technology, is bad; I want to say that without adequate processes, which regard policy (but policy-makers can only do this if they have all the elements they need to understand and judge the risks), we risk being too late. And this is also because there is unfortunately a big difference in terms of speed between science and politics, between technology and politics. Progress is moving extremely fast, while political decision-making processes tend to slow down.

This is one of the major issues we are addressing at national level, and we are also bringing it to Italy’s Presidency of the G7, which as you know is this year. We of course want to do this by talking about and engaging on this issue with the scientific community, with major international players and with companies that produce generative artificial intelligence. We want to do this by endeavouring to give body and soul to the concept of ‘algorethics’, i.e., giving ethics to algorithms. We did not come up with this concept ourselves; this work began with a wonderful initiative organised by the Vatican in 2020. I believe this must be the compass that accompanies our work as a nation and clearly in multilateral fora, because these are not issues that nation states can tackle and solve alone.

This has already been mentioned and I cannot help but reiterate: we have always been the home of genius and science. Our history is studded with extraordinary discoveries that have changed the course of history, from Archimedes to Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Guglielmo Marconi, Enrico Fermi, Carlo Rubbia, Fabiola Giannotti.

Over the centuries, we have discovered paths that others hadn’t even dreamed of, and we have often been pioneers. This is a capacity that is innate in our people. Why is this worth remembering? It is not worth remembering in order to idolise ourselves or to praise our own efforts. It is worth remembering because sometimes, I think we are all aware, it is almost as if, at some point, Italy convinced itself that it had lost the ability to teach the world something. However, with respect to our history and our past, it is not ability we are lacking; we are sometimes lacking the will, or the awareness of the value we have inherited and the value we still have today. 

In this regard, I think that new impetus can only be given, as I was saying, if science and politics return to the balance that formed the basis of our civilisation’s greatness. We are Italian and we are also European, we are children of a Europe in which, not by chance, science, technology and humanism merged, making fertile ground on which to build the great cathedrals. If you think about it, the construction of a cathedral, in my view, is an image that describes the relationship that should exist between politics and technology very well. Without the craftsmen of the time, without their talent and studies, it would not have been possible to complete those projects. However, without the will to complete those projects, they simply would not have existed.

Today the challenges are different, but I believe the mechanism must remain the same. I am thinking of one of the areas you address in the Manifesto: the circular economy and clean energy. It is up to politics to set the goals, i.e., to minimise the impact of human activities on the environment and bring about a sustainable energy transition, which in my view should not be ideological; it is up to science to identify the technologies that can help achieve those goals. All technologies: clearly those already in use, those we are experimenting with, those we have yet to discover. We are not just talking about renewables, we are talking about gas, we are talking about biofuels, hydrogen and carbon dioxide capture, we are talking about technologies that allow us to transform from a linear to a circular economy, to use waste as raw materials, to turn marginal land that cannot be used by agriculture for food purposes into cultivable land.

That is without forgetting the great prospect, the great dream, regarding the possibility to produce clean and unlimited energy from nuclear fusion, in the not so distant future. Italy is of course the home of Enrico Fermi; in this it is historically second to none, and thanks to our technological know-how, thanks to our advanced academic studies, thanks to the research and development carried out by our centres of excellence and by our production system, we can continue to grow, we can continue to give the world new discoveries and a better and different future.

There is one last point I would like to touch on before giving the floor to the other speakers, especially Minister Bernini and Minister Schillaci who will be providing more details on the work the Government is doing and the measures we have launched so far to support the world of science. That point regards another area you deal with in your manifesto and that I also personally care about a great deal. You address this when you talk about a knowledge-based society. This clearly concerns the field of education. You know this better than I do, but according to a World Bank study, 80% of wealth in the most advanced nations is immaterial, i.e., it is wealth represented by knowledge. It is knowledge that makes the difference in this day and age, and this will increasingly be the case, especially if we look at the so-called STEM subjects, i.e., the technical-scientific disciplines. In Italy, the indicators unfortunately show an ongoing misalignment between supply and demand. According to ISTAT, less than a quarter of Italian graduates aged between 25 and 34 studied STEM subjects, which is lower than the European average. On the other hand, Italian companies are telling us that they have significant difficulty in finding professionals with training in these disciplines. These subjects are of course the basis of all the great transitions we can talk about, that indeed we have talked about and are also talking about this morning: nano- and biotechnologies, neuroscience, robotics, data analysis, civil engineering, aerospace; in other words, we are talking about how to build the future.

Our aim is clearly to reverse this trend. We are taking the first steps in this direction, both in the field of education and advanced technical training and with regard to incentivising researchers to stay in Italy, but that’s not all: we must not only worry about not letting our brightest minds get away, but we must also ask ourselves why Italy, which is the homeland we have talked about, is failing to be as attractive as it naturally should be. Clearly this is something we need to work hard on, knowing that every euro invested in a subject like this has an extraordinary multiplier effect. Also in this regard, when we talk about spending, the issue is never the expenditure itself but rather what kind of expenditure it is and what kind of multiplier effect it can give. The same euro invested in three different things gives three completely different multipliers. When you invest in this subject, you invest in a return in terms of gross domestic product, in wealth for our nation, with an extremely high multiplier effect.

In the same way, I think this nation must have the courage to believe in great scientific and technological projects, and that is what we are trying to do with this Government. I am thinking of the great challenge Italy is facing regarding its candidature to host the Einstein Telescope. This is a unique project that would allow us to revolutionise the way in which we observe the universe, and would also have an enormous return in terms of employment and in terms of development in the area we have nominated to host this extraordinary innovation, as indeed is always the case with initiatives such as this. This is clearly an opportunity that we do not want to miss and Italy has what it takes to achieve this objective (of course, it has what it takes, as always, as long as the Italian economic system all works together on it, compactly).

After all, we have already done this in the past; just think of the construction of the world's largest optical infrared telescope in Chile (the ‘Extremely Large Telescope’) as well as all the sectors in which our companies continue to achieve important levels of performance around the world, from electronics to superconductors, precision mechanics and artificial intelligence, also and above all in our own country.

The history of our people is a history of great feats, creativity and achievements that have impressed the world. It is a history made of choices, a history made of courage. I often like to tell one such story of courage, of the choices that made a difference: the story of Edoardo Amaldi, one of the ‘guys from Via Panisperna'. As you know, after the war, he was offered the chance to move to the United States and, even back then, that would perhaps have been the more lucrative option for him personally, but he said no and decided to stay in Italy. That choice was decisive in leading us to a fundamental step in our work, namely the establishment of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, the launch of international scientific institutions such as CERN, and the maintenance and revival of what Italian universities can achieve.

There is a common thread that connects this story to what we are talking about today, and that common thread is precisely the ability and strength to make choices of the heart, and the courage to have a vision and believe in that vision. This may seem like an oxymoron but the truth is that, if we stop dreaming, science also loses out. Italy’s problem is above all this: for a while it forgot to dream, and it ended up also forgetting what it is capable of doing when it does dream and believes in those dreams. 

Today our main challenge, the one that comes before and encompasses all the others, is precisely this: to go back to thinking big, to go back to believing in ourselves, in our talents and our drive, not just on the basis of our past, but on the basis of what we are today. 
We must not look back and say 'well, yes, just look at what we were' and think that our heritage is simply about praising what came before us. Heritage only has meaning if we take it on board, heritage only has meaning if we pass it on. This is clearly also something that no one can do alone, but we can definitely do it if we all believe in it together. In the end, the words of one of the greatest philosophers of science, Karl Popper, are still so important: “The future is wide open and depends on us, on all of us. It depends on what you and I and many other people do and will do, today, tomorrow and the day after”.

Thank you.

[Courtesy translation]