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JUNE/JULY 2008 |
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Italian Doctors Protest Unfair Funding Practices Pierpaolo Basso A furor over the persistent lack of fair rules and regulations to allocate funding for scientific research in Italy has provoked the launch of a public petition signed by over 1500 scientists to the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, according to an article in the journal Science. Antonio Giordano, M.D., Ph.D., an Italian scientist and the Founder and President of the Sbarro Health Research Organization (www.shro.org), a nonprofit cancer research institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has long supported the reform movement. “Italy remains on the bottom rung when it comes to funding scientific research in Europe,†says Giordano. “And money collected by my nation, through public appeals or television shows, goes straight to the North, leaving the South behind.†The scandal over scientific funding started last year when some prominent researchers learned that 3 million euros set aside for stem cell research in the 2007 Italian national finance act had “already been allocated†and an unofficial list of awardees leaked to the scientific community. The awards had been made without a call for applications or any other official public announcement of the initiative and how it would be managed. The scientists’ petition, published on May 11, 2008 in a national Italian newspaper, recommends that a new agency be created to end such practices and to manage scientific funding. “In Italy, only a small proportion of funds for scientific research are assigned according to the peer review process. It is high time that an evaluation system which assures science’s success is translated into state laws and regulations,†it declares. Despite calls for reform, a new law designed to centralize the distribution of university grants may continue favoritism and political influence. In addition, the lack of published rules or public competition for the so-called FIRST fund, a new resource that will offer 300 million euros in 2008 and 360 million euros in 2009, has drawn concern. “Good science can come from anywhere,†says Giordano. “Peer review and established procedures will serve everyone.†|
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