Anna Meldolesi
 

In his latest effort to undermine agbiotech (Nat. Biotechnol. 18, 919, 2000;MEDLINE), the Italian minister of agriculture Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio has explicitly told scientists they will no longer receive funding from the ministry unless they eliminate GMOs entirely from their experiments, even if it means abandoning research conducted over the past 4 years. Urging the public and scientific community to oppose Pecoraro Scanio's unilateral decision, the Nobel Prize winner Renato Dulbecco of the Institute for Biomedical technologies in Milan, together with leading geneticists, stem cell researchers, anthropologists, and physicists, published a petition in the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore (November 5) defending public research and freedom of scientific thought. Since then, more than 500 international researchers have signed, including director of the Center for Plant Biotechnology Research at Tuskegee University CS Prakash, whose own petition in support of agbiotech (http://www.agbioworld.org ) has more than 2,900 signatures worldwide. Those wishing to endorse the Italian petition should email e-mail: appelloMipaf@hotmail.com.