Top brains quit Italy in protest at nepotism

A senior Italian scientist left for a job in France yesterday in the second fuga dei cervelli or "flight of the brains" in a week.

Professor Giovanni Bignami, the former scientific director of the Italian Space Agency, is taking up the directorship of a public institution of astrophysics. He said he was leaving because public research in Italy was heavily penalised.

On 3 January, Professor Ignazio Marino, a liver transplant surgeon, left Rome to become divisional head at a university in Philadelphia. He had been lured back from the United States four years ago with the promise of creating from scratch a top-flight transplant hospital in Palermo, Sicily. But he encountered "thousands of problems", the most memorable being the failure of the hospital's air-conditioning plant during an operation. He listed corruption and nepotism among the problems.

His departure provoked a wave of soul-searching. "It is a sign of decadence that extends beyond the field of research," said Paolo Amati, the president of the Italian Federation of Life Science.

Professor Marino said he would not be back "as long as the culture of personal privilege prevails".