An Italian nightmare

Science under politics. An Italian nightmare (Elena Cattaneo & Gilberto Corbellini, EMBO reports (2011) 12, 19 - 22) è stato pubblicatao qualche mese fa. Ma non è di certo invecchiato.
Queste le conclusioni.

One could ask whether the situation in Italy is simply a local consequence of a deteriorating relationship between science and society, or between scientists and politicians. In other words, is Italy an exception, or simply a vision of things to come in other countries? Regardless, the predicament of Italian science and scientists should stand as a warning of what happens when the rules of transparency are overridden, the scientific community remains largely silent, scientific facts have marginal political influence and science communication is helpless against ideologically driven propaganda that manipulates facts on a large scale (Corbellini, 2010). The experience of scientists in the USA during the Bush administration shows that for other countries this possibility is not too far-fetched and that, to paraphrase the British statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797): bad science flourishes when good scientists do nothing.