I was in Rome this Saturday morning to attend a public event on Cancer Research which I had announced a couple of days ago. The event was nice and friendly and people heard about the importance of keeping up with a healthy diet, do their share of daily physical exercise, and so on. Plain language, easy peasy.

The part which I liked the most was the contribution of Dr. Odifreddi, a Mathematician who has embraced popular science and written several books, in Italian. Dr. Odifreddi’s point was that Italian public funding to basic science is well below the European average. One would think that Italy cannot afford spending any more cents for its research. However, please consider the following math exercise. Think of the total European annual fund for scientific research (Hint: the latest 5-year FP7 program is in the tens of millions of Euros range). Now multiply this figure by 3. Done your math? The figure that you have got is the annual funding provided by Italy alone to the Vatican State, to support Catholic schools, pay the bills (just the annual water bill paid for the Vatican is half the annual total fund raised by the Italian Association for Cancer Research), and more. Now that is quite a lot of money that a State pays to another State. In fact…the EU is already pointing a finger at Italy for this.

This obligation to support the Vatican is, apparently, a consequence of 1929’s Lateranensi Agreements (sorry the link is to a page in Italian), later updated by Bettino Craxi in 1984 in Villa Madama. I am sure that you can think what Italy could do if it did not have to put these money into that pot, and I am not just meaning scientific research. Think of hospitals, infrastructures.

So, next time you pop into the Vatican, ask them whether they can spare a test tube for you.