from Leadership Medica n. 8/1999

Why it is always necessary to look for, out of Italy, the acknowledgement you deserve and you do not succeed in achieving within national limits?
In Italy the scientific branches compel the better brains to a forced migration. Too often they talk about a scientific colonisation carried out in Italy by the most advanced technology States, but later too often you discover that those technological successes are the result of a research carried out by Italians abroad, mainly in the United States and North Europe. Indeed it lacks in this race for transferring one's own activity abroad the basic requirement concerning mutual exchanges so to explain the phenomenon as the modernisation of the labour market.
But even this explanation does not fit since it does not concern people going to perform secondary duties, but often concerns professionals demanded just for the competence achieved in Italy and on Italy's charge but who do not succeed in finding a job fitting their professional skills within the national territory.
Naturally it is neglected that the real reason for this brain drain in the scientific and university field is due to the real impossibility to get at home the acknowledgement that, just for the effect of the ideas spread all over the world, must more easily be achieved ten of thousands miles far than from the next room.
On the other side if renowned members of the Italian government do not succeed watching at the photo report published by several newspapers concerning the huge mass of a thousand containers piled up on the dock of Bari, would they realise of some thousands of brains emigrated a few at a time?
Italy is the country of the ad hoc competitions, studied on paper, agreed with an administration, politicised to the backbone, by the means of notices of competition that most complying with law they couldn't be but that, by sheer coincidence, expire on mid-August holidays, Christmas or New Year's Day, requiring very strict terms and acknowledged by few.
In this matter the competent ministries have not been sparing of ad hoc laws, they output several meters of them in average weekly so it is possible to find at any time a law, an article, a paragraph, able to legitimate special targets.
That Italy has impoverished of a brain that could have given prestige to his own country means just nothing, he has the job, anyhow, even if abroad, the matter at point is that the person to whom that charge was destined to and that would never have been required abroad, has not be left in the lurch.

Amedeo Pavone