Human Technopole, PRIN e il Futuro della Ricerca Italiana

Good news (with some doubts), and bad news.

The good news: the Government has announced the start of the operational phase of the "Human Technopole" research center (link .); Report of the Hearing of the Minister of Agricultural Policies in relation to "Italia 2040 Human Technopole" (Act no. 827). . with some interesting changes compared to the initial orientation. Some problems remain unresolved, or even created from scratch.

The bad news: few crumbs have been allocated to the so-called research of national interest, the PRIN, so much so that only 6% of the projects presented are financed, often with substantial budget cuts which in most cases will prevent the completion of the project. research as formulated and evaluated. The searches considered excellent were at least 3 times more numerous.

The two news items read together mean that Italy has money for only a third of excellent research, and achievable now, but spends 10 times more on excellent research that at best will be achievable in many years. The government has already transferred 80 million to Arexpo, the owner of the areas, to partially cover the expenses for areas and buildings (but no research for now). In short: public research dies for lack of resources, which resources are committed to creating the containers of research that will no longer exist in a few years if we go forward at this rate.

We argue that we must continue to invest in HT, but that at the same time it is immediately necessary to at least triple the resources allocated to the PRIN in order to be able to finance all research considered excellent and only slightly below the maximum score.

In this regard, we make ours the proposal of the 2003 Group, relaunched by Professor and Senator for life Elena Cattaneo, to immediately use the so-called "Treasury" of 430 million euros made available to the IIT in recent years and remained unspent for reopen the PRINs and finance all projects considered excellent but not funded because they are just below the maximum score.

Valeria Poli, Gennaro Ciliberto, Marco Bianchi