The Stamina Foundation has been administering the therapy at the public hospital Spedali Civili of Brescia to people with a range of degenerative diseases. Their approach is based on mesenchymal stem cells, derived from bone marrow, which can become mature bone and connective tissue.

In 2011 the hospital agreed to host the research and assist with cell extraction and patient treatments, stirring protests from the medical community. “The hospital is not even listed among the 13 Italian authorised stem cell factories,” says Michele de Luca, director and gene therapy programme coordinator at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Modena. After an inspection in 2012, ordered an immediate halt to Stamina’s stem cell treatments at the hospital.

The AIFA report says the Stamina Foundation’s treatment did not follow Italy’s official path required for clinical approval. So far no scientific publications describing its effectiveness are available.

But the halt sparked protests among patients’ families who believed the treatment was working. Some appealed to the courts, and as a result a few patients were allowed to go ahead with the therapy. On 15 March, a group of 13 Italian stem cell researchers published an , asking him to shut down all of the Stamina Foundation’s treatments at the hospital.

Instead Balduzzi signed a bill last week authorising the foundation to continue treatments in patients who had already begun the regime .

Update: Following the publication of this interview, a number of readers have suggested that our correspondent should have pressed Grillo more closely on statements he has made about science in the past. We have invited , president of the professional association Science Writers in Italy, to respond in the comments below.

Original article, published 27 February 2013:

In an exclusive interview, the comedian turned politician reveals how celebrating science and technology in his comedy act launched his political career

How did this adventure start?
In 2005 I had a blog, where people discussed topics such as a sustainable economy, renewable energy and broadband coverage. I also used to spread information about new technologies during my comedy shows – using on stage to show how they worked.

I started using my blog to get information about cities I was about to visit, asking followers what the main problems there were. Many mentioned misconduct of politicians, and other things I wanted to talk about during my shows.

Then, before a show in one city, local politicians called saying they would sue if I said something unpleasant. This was the sign that the blog was working! Since then, it has grown to become one of the first three blogs in the world.

Italy has big problems with internet coverage. How did a web movement become the first party of the nation?
I used my fame and my reputation and put myself at the disposal of the people, and they started to participate and discuss, first through the web and then face to face.

How did you make the transition from the web to in person events?
I used a website called , and in each city, people first communicated through the website and then met in person to discuss the problems of their city. After that, we decided to organise bigger events. At an event called the V Day held in several Italian cities, there were a million and a half people! What a surprise! There were also other cities connected via Skype – Milan, New York, London. In half a day, we collected around 350,000 signatures for a “clean parliament” law.

Many political movements are born on the Internet. But few manage to shift from protests to positions in government. What did you do differently?
We thought about the next stage, and also how to avoid street clashes. And the next stage was the civic list [through which people register as supporters of the new movement, and not existing political parties]. Civic lists have formed spontaneously and are now spreading like wildfire throughout the country.

At some point in your comedy shows, you started talking about science and technology. Soon people came to see you as much to be informed as to laugh. What drove this?
I started to be curious about what was behind everyday things – the path that a can of coke or pot of yogurt takes to reach us, for example, and how much this costs, what natural resources it consumes, how much it pollutes. And I began to understand the schizophrenic paths of our current economy.

So I turned to scientists and intellectuals to see if there were more sustainable paths ways to do things. Prominent scientists later wrote for my blog, discussed ideas. Lino Guzzella, the rector of ETH Zurich, came on stage at one of my shows to explain what the energy of the future will be.

Were there other widespread public discussions on topics like renewable energy in Italy at that time?
I would say no. The ideas of these intellectuals were in books, books most politicians obviously did not read. I studied them and then brought the ideas into my shows.

Why do you think politicians in Italy aren’t looking to science and technology to help find a way out from economic crisis?
Over the last decades politicians have removed many valuable people from industry and the government, in order to substitute them with their friends. So you end up with people in positions of power who know nothing about research, technology, innovation, clean energy, sustainable economy. Nothing!

Now that you are in the government, what place will scientific research have in your program?
A primary place. One of our main objectives is to restore meritocracy within research and academia, where cronyism is also widespread. We also want to give money back to public research that is dying.

In the last two years, the government spent €1 billion on official cars and hundreds of millions of euros on private schools, while only €38 million went to basic research for 2013. Amazing!

How do Italian scientists view your ?
There are plenty of researchers on our civic lists. There are also many who live abroad who are ready to come back to help. They send us tons of tweets every day. In Italy, we have some of the best minds in the world and we have let them all go abroad. But if we give a strong signal of change, they will come back.

Interview translated from Italian

After fertilisation, an embryo must embed itself within the inner layer of the uterus – the endometrium. The endometrium is only receptive to an embryo for four days in each menstrual cycle, ensuring that implantation occurs at the right time.

By analysing human endometrial cells implanted in mice, at the University of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues discovered that the four-day window is regulated by a molecule called interleukin-33. IL-33 controls signals to genes that make the endometrium sticky enough for implantation. These signals are switched off after four days when the endometrium starts to prepare for the next cycle.

In mice receiving cells from women who’d had more than one miscarriage, IL-33 signals lasted up to 10 days. Subsequent pregnancies failed in these mice because the embryo implanted when the endometrium could not support it.

“This is an important discovery,” says at the University of Southampton, UK. “We now have a potential [drug] target to improve the selective function of the endometrium.”

Journal reference:

The European parliament voted to elect Tonio Borg as the European Union’s new health commissioner on Wednesday, despite warnings from scientists and NGOs that his personal opinions would influence policy.

Borg, the foreign minister and deputy prime minister of Malta, will replace fellow Maltese John Dalli, who resigned after being linked to a Maltese businessman alleged to have sought money from the tobacco industry in return for influencing European tobacco legislation.

Borg is Catholic and is known for his conservative views on abortion, homosexuality and divorce. For example, he is a supporter of the currently being debated in the Maltese parliament. If approved at the end of November, the bill will prevent experimentation on human embryos, ban egg and sperm donation, and prohibit the freezing of embryos for IVF procedures other than in a few special cases.

Under the bill, Maltese citizens would be forced to seek consent from a newly created public body before embarking on IVF treatment, and unapproved sperm or egg donation would be punishable with a fine of up to €23,000 and five years in prison.

EU hearing

On 13 November, Borg attended an EU parliament hearing to put forward his case for taking up the post of health and consumer policy commissioner. He said he would speed up the new anti-tobacco bill originally proposed by Dalli and put an end to animal testing for cosmetics by March 2013.

Borg assured the parliament that his personal views wouldn’t drive his policies. “Each one of us has his own personal views. God forbid that we should all be regimented into thinking in one way.”

He also told parliament that he would not interfere with research programmes already under way, including work on HIV/AIDS as well as stem cells, though he did not say whether he intends to renew their funding in future.

Some MEPs questioned Borg’s stance on abortion, recalling how he tried to incorporate the ban on abortion, even if the mother’s life is at risk, into Malta’s constitution. Borg replied: “The laws on abortion are a matter of national law… These are not matters within the competence of the Commission and the Union.”

On Wednesday 386 MEPs voted in favour of Borg , with 281 voting against and 28 abstentions. Vittorio Prodi, a member of the European parliament’s committee on the environment, public health and food safety, said that despite Borg’s personal views, he believes the new commissioner will do a good job, working in the EU’s interest. “He showed a lot of deference for the EU parliament,” Prodi says.

Ethical issues

Dutch MEP Sophia in ‘t Veld, of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe bloc in the European parliament, feels differently. “A commissioner must not only attend to administrative practice but deal with ethical and political issues. So it is illogical to think that his personal views won’t count,” she says.

NGOs campaigning for reproductive rights and stem cell scientists have also expressed concerns over Borg’s impending appointment, which still has to be formally approved by the European Council. “Despite commitments made at the hearing, our organisation’s strong objection to his nomination still remains,” says Irene Donadio from International Planned Parenthood Federation, a non-profit body based in London.

Francesco Dazzi, head of stem cell biology at Imperial College London, says Borg’s election might have “profound impacts” on funding for stem cell biology and its therapeutic applications. “Although I do not dispute his technical skills, there is the risk that personal views, especially when radical in nature, will interfere with or slow down important projects which have already been endorsed by public opinion,” he says.

The story isn’t over yet. Last Monday, six Italian seismologists and a civil protection official were sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter, for falsely reassuring the public that a major earthquake would not happen. But two recorded phone calls involving a more senior official suggest that the whole story has not been told about meetings held in the week prior to the earthquake and after the event.

Wiretap evidence suggests that Guido Bertolaso, then a chief of civil protection, ordered one of the defendants to issue a reassuring statement. A newly released audio recording also appears to show Bertolaso trying to conceal information in the aftermath of the quake.

Franco Coppi, who legally represents Giulio Selvaggi, one of the convicted seismologists, calls Bertolaso the “great absent member of the trial”. “All these scientists were sent to L’Aquila with a precise task,” he told ��è����Ƶ. “Given that they are considered responsible for insufficient communication, it would have been important as well to consider what mandate Bertolaso gave them.”

The case relates to a magnitude-6.3 earthquake that struck the Italian town of L’Aquila on 6 April 2009, killing more than 300 people. A week before, the six seismologists met to discuss the risk of a quake, following months of small tremors. They concluded it was possible a major quake was on the way, but . Later, a civil protection official, Bernardo De Bernardinis, gave a statement saying there was little or no risk.

The trial was not about the seismologists’ failure to predict the earthquake, as earthquake prediction is currently impossible. Rather it was about the failure to communicate the small but real risk of a major quake. Reassured by the statements, people stayed indoors instead of sleeping outside, putting them in more danger.

Caught on tape

Bertolaso, De Bernardinis’s superior, had previously his phone tapped as part of an unrelated investigation by the Italian authorities. In January this year the Italian newspaper La Repubblica between Bertolaso and one of his officials ().

In the recording, translated here, Bertolaso says: “I told him [De Bernardinis] to schedule a meeting in L’Aquila about this story of this swarm quake[…] to immediately silence any imbecile’s allegations, concerns and so on.” He continues: “That is a media operation, you understand? So they, […] the leading experts of earthquakes, they will say: it is normal, these are phenomena that often occur, it is better to have one hundred shocks of the 4th grade on the Richter scale rather than silence, because one hundred shocks release energy and so there will never be a shock that really hurts.”

Bertolaso now says he was repeating statements made about earthquakes in the past. “These types of statements have always been made in the 10 years that I have held this post. But obviously, I didn’t make them, all those who participated in scientific seismic risk activities made them.”

Seismologists contacted by ��è����Ƶ say the reasoning is incorrect. Small tremors on a fault do not necessarily mean a large one is coming, but neither do they necessarily make a future large earthquake less likely.

Later in the recording Bertolaso adds: “And also say that the meeting is organised not because we are scared and worried, but because we want to reassure the people. And instead of you and me talking to the population, we make the top scientists in the field of seismology talk.”

Bartolaso denies telling the seismologists what to say. “The scientific committee is absolutely autonomous and independent,” he told ��è����Ƶ.

, Science reported that . However, he was not added to the then ongoing trial, and has not been charged.

Political pressure

A new wiretap recording was . It features Bertolaso talking to Enzo Boschi, one of the convicted seismologists, on 9 April 2009 – three days after the quake. In it he appears to order Boschi to conceal information.

Bertolaso says he has been asked about the risk of further shocks, and says: “This afternoon there will be a meeting of the Great Hazard Commission at the INGV []. So I said that the meeting is aimed at this. It is obvious that the truth about the situation cannot be told.” Boschi told ��è����Ƶ that the meeting was to assess the likelihood that a nearby dam on Lake Campotosto could collapse. Models determined there was no risk of this and the expert group decided there was no need to raise the alarm. In the event, the dam held.

In the recording, Bertolaso later says: “At the end you’ll file a press release with the usual stuff that you can say on the subject, on the potential of a new one [earthquake], and you won’t mention the real reason for this meeting. All right?”

Boschi replies: “Probably there’s a bit of confusion, surely because of my fault. The true reason for the meeting is understanding how the area will evolve.” And later: “Yes, yes, don’t you worry. I can assure you that our attitude is extremely cooperative.”

Continuing fallout

Boschi’s lawyer Marcello Melandri told ��è����Ƶ that the wiretap has been misunderstood. When asked whether he thought Bertolaso should be charged, Melandri said that he should not be.

The fallout from the verdict continues. Three senior members of Italy’s National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, which is at the centre of the case, have , saying it is now impossible to do their work.

So said the UK Home Office last week as it announced plans to give law-enforcement agencies, local councils and other public bodies access to the details of people’s text messages, emails and internet activity. The move followed its announcement in May that it was considering creating a massive central database to store all this data, as a tool to help the security services tackle crime and terrorism.

Meanwhile in the US the FISA Amendments Act, which became law in July, allows the security services to intercept anyone’s international phone calls and emails without a warrant for up to seven days. Governments around the world are developing increasingly sophisticated electronic surveillance methods in a bid to identify terrorist cells or spot criminal activity.

However, technology companies, in particular telecommunications firms and internet service providers, have often been criticised for assisting governments in what many see as unwarranted intrusion, most notably in China.

Now German electronics company Siemens has gone a step further, developing a complete “surveillance in a box” system called the Intelligence Platform, designed for security services in Europe and Asia. It has already sold the system to 60 countries.

According to a document obtained by ��è����Ƶ, the system integrates tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs “intelligence modules”.

This software is trained on a large number of sample documents to pick out items such as names, phone numbers and places from generic text. This means it can spot names or numbers that crop up alongside anyone already of interest to the authorities, and then catalogue any documents that contain such associates.

Once a person is being monitored, pattern-recognition software first identifies their typical behaviour, such as repeated calls to certain numbers over a period of a few months. The software can then identify any deviations from the norm and flag up unusual activities, such as transactions with a foreign bank, or contact with someone who is also under surveillance, so that analysts can take a closer look.

Included within the package is a phone call “monitoring centre”, developed by the joint-venture company Nokia Siemens Networks.

However, it is far from clear whether the technology will prove accurate. Security experts warn that data-fusion technologies tend to produce a huge number of false positives, flagging up perfectly innocent people as suspicious.

“These systems tend to produce false positives, flagging up innocent people as suspicious”

“Combining two different sources of data has the tendency to increase your false-positive rate or your false-negative rate,” says Ross Anderson, a computer security engineer at the University of Cambridge. “If you’re looking for burglars in a run-down district where 50 per cent of men have a criminal conviction, you may find plenty. But if you’re trying to find terrorists among airline passengers – where they are extremely rare – then almost all your hits will be false.”

Computer security expert Bruce Schneier agrees. “Currently there are no good patterns available to recognise terrorists,” he says, and questions whether Siemens has got around this.

Whatever the level of accuracy, human rights advocates are concerned that the system could give surveillance-hungry repressive regimes a ready-made means of monitoring their citizens. Carole Samdup of the organisation Rights and Democracy in Montreal, Canada, says the system bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese government’s “Golden Shield” concept, a massive surveillance network encompassing internet and email monitoring as well as speech and facial-recognition technologies and closed-circuit TV cameras.

In 2001, Rights and Democracy raised concerns about the potential for governments to integrate huge information databases with real-time analysis to track the activities of individuals. “Now in 2008 these very characteristics are presented as value-added selling points in the company advertisement of its product,” Samdup says.

In June, the PRISE consortium of security technology and human-rights experts, funded by the European Union (EU), submitted a report to the European Commission asking for a moratorium on the development of data-fusion technologies, referring explicitly to the Siemens Intelligence Platform.

“The efficiency and reliability of such tools is as yet unknown,” says the report. “More surveillance does not necessarily lead to a higher level of societal security. Hence there must be a thorough examination of whether the resulting massive constraints on human rights are proportionate and justified.”

Nokia Siemens says 90 of the systems are already being used around the world, although it hasn’t specified which countries are using it. A spokesman for the company said, “We implement stringent safeguards to prevent misuse of such systems for unauthorised purposes. In all countries where we operate we do business strictly according to the Nokia Siemens Networks standard code of conduct and UN and EU export regulations.”

Samdup argues that such systems should fall under government controls that are imposed on “dual-use” goods – systems that could be used both for civil and military purposes. Security technologies usually escape these controls. For example, the EU regulation on the export and transfer of dual-use technology does not include surveillance and intelligence technologies on the list of items that must be checked and authorised before they are exported to certain countries.

The problem is that surveillance technologies have developed so rapidly that they have outpaced developments in export controls, says Samdup. “In many cases politicians, policy-makers and human-rights organisations lack the technical expertise to adequately assess the impact that such technology could have when it is exported to repressive regimes.”