ERC President’s speech 'Investing in knowledge to protect lives: shaping Europe’s scientific future'

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Dear President Bellantone, Professor Minghetti, distinguished colleagues, dear friends, 

Thank you very much for the invitation. It is a pleasure to be here at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, and a real honour to speak at the opening of the academic year.

The title of today’s session is 'Investing in knowledge to protect lives'. 

And I think we all understand that protecting lives is not only about responding well when a crisis arrives. It is not only about hospitals, vaccines, diagnostics, public health advice, surveillance, or emergency measures, although of course it is all of those things.

It is also about what was done ten, twenty, thirty years earlier.

It is about whether someone had the freedom to ask a difficult question before its usefulness was obvious. It is about whether a research system had the patience to support work that looked obscure at the time. It is about whether institutions had the confidence to invest in knowledge before there was a clear product, market, or political demand.

That is the case I want to make today.

Frontier research is not a luxury. It is not something we support after the practical work has been funded. It is one of the conditions that makes the practical work possible.

And in health, perhaps more than anywhere else, we know this.

The road from discovery to patient benefit is long, indirect, and often quite strange. It rarely moves in a straight line from “problem” to “solution”. It involves detours, failure, and ideas that looked abstract becoming essential.

Think of mRNA vaccines. By the time most people heard of them, during the pandemic, they seemed almost miraculous. But there was no miracle in the simple sense. There was decades of work on RNA biology, lipid nanoparticles, immunology, structural biology, vaccine platforms, and manufacturing. Much of that work was funded because scientists were trying to understand basic mechanisms, and because funders and institutions allowed them to continue.

Or take monoclonal antibodies. They are now part of modern medicine, but their origins lie in basic work on the immune system, cell fusion, antibody specificity and molecular recognition.

Or take CRISPR. It began with the study of how bacteria defend themselves against viruses. Few people, at the beginning, would have described it as the basis for a new generation of genome editing tools.

These examples are familiar, but they are still worth repeating, because we often forget their lesson. We celebrate the breakthrough when it arrives. We are less good at remembering the conditions that made it possible.

And one of those conditions is time.

This is not always an easy message in politics. Political cycles are short. Budgets are negotiated under pressure. Ministries have to show results. Public funders are asked, reasonably, what taxpayers are getting for their money. In health, the pressure is even stronger, because the needs are so immediate. Patients are waiting. Health systems are under strain. Ageing populations, antimicrobial resistance, mental health, chronic disease, pandemic preparedness, environmental health — none of these can be postponed.

So I understand very well why governments want research to be useful. I want research to be useful too. But the question is not whether research should have an impact. The question is how impact actually happens.

If we demand that every project explain its impact too early and too narrowly, we may make science look more accountable, but we will make it less capable of producing the discoveries we need. We will reward safe language. We will favour the questions that already fit existing categories. And we will miss the ideas that do not yet have a name.

That would be a mistake for science. It would also be a mistake for public health.

The history of this Institute is a useful reminder. The ISS began in the 1930s with a strong public health purpose. Its early laboratories dealt with malaria, bacteriology, chemistry and physics. That combination already says something important. Public health was not treated as a narrow administrative task. It required field knowledge, laboratory science, measurement, chemistry, physics, and training. It required an institution able to connect research, standards, expertise and the needs of the state.

That history matters because it shows that health protection depends on institutions with memory. Institutions that can act in a crisis, yes, but also institutions that can preserve capacity between crises.

Europe often talks about competitiveness, sovereignty and resilience. These are important words, although I confess that sometimes I wish we used them a little less and explained them a little more.

For me, resilience in science means that when a new disease appears, we already have people who understand viruses, immunity, diagnostics, modelling and behaviour. It means that when antibiotic resistance grows, we have microbiologists, chemists, clinicians, evolutionary biologists and data scientists who have been working on the problem for years. It means that when climate change affects health, we can connect environmental science, epidemiology, social science, medicine and public policy.

Resilience is not built in the moment of emergency. It is built before the emergency, often quietly.

I am President of the European Research Council, so you will not be surprised that I believe strongly in frontier research. But I do not want to present the ERC as a magic solution. Europe needs many kinds of research funding: strong national systems, stable institutions, clinical research, public health research, missions, infrastructure, innovation funding, industry, and regulation that is intelligent and proportionate.

The ERC has a specific role within this wider system.

It funds researchers to pursue ambitious ideas at the frontiers of knowledge. It does not define thematic priorities. It does not ask applicants to fit into a political programme. It asks a simpler and more demanding question: is this an excellent researcher with a ground-breaking idea?

That simplicity is important. It gives researchers room to think. It gives them time. It gives them independence. It allows young researchers to build teams, established researchers to take risks, and groups of researchers to come together when a question is too large or too complex for one team.

And it is open to all fields. That matters too. Health research does not only come from medicine. It comes from biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, engineering, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, ethics and law. A new diagnostic tool may depend on physics. A better public health intervention may depend on behavioural science. A better understanding of vaccine uptake may depend on trust, communication and social context.

If we care about health, we must care about the full breadth of knowledge.

Let me say a little about the opportunities the ERC offers.

Its grants support researchers at different stages: those establishing their independence, those consolidating their teams, established leaders with ambitious projects, and groups of researchers tackling problems that none of them could solve alone. Proof of Concept funding then helps ERC grantees explore the innovation potential of discoveries from their ERC-funded research.

The 2026 Work Programme also introduced the ERC Plus Grant, under the Choose Europe initiative. This is intended for outstanding researchers with a vision to transform a field or open a new one. It is an important signal: Europe wants to be a place where ambitious researchers can do work at real scale.

For potential applicants, I would give simple advice. Do not try to guess what Europe wants to hear. Do not decorate a conventional project with fashionable words. Do not write a proposal that sounds strategic but is scientifically timid. The ERC is looking for intellectual ambition, clarity, rigour and independence. Of course, the proposal has to be well prepared. But at the centre there must be a real scientific idea.

For deans, directors and institutional leaders, I would say this: ERC success is not only an individual matter. It depends on the environment around the applicant.

Researchers need time to write properly. They need colleagues who will read critically. They need administrative support that understands the rules without taking over the science. But most of all, they need an institutional culture that respects ambition.

A good ERC proposal cannot be produced by bureaucracy. But it can certainly be damaged by bureaucracy.

This is why I welcome the Italian government’s new three-year research plan. I do not want to comment on national policy in detail; that is not my role. But the broad direction is encouraging. A multi-year framework, more predictable timing of calls and evaluations, and support for basic and applied research are all important.

Researchers can live with competition. They can live with selectivity. What is much harder is uncertainty: not knowing when calls will come, how long evaluations will take, or whether a scheme will continue. Predictability is not glamorous, but it is one of the foundations of a serious research system.

At European level, we need the same seriousness.

The next EU budget, for 2028 to 2034, will be one of the most important decisions for Europe’s scientific future. It will determine whether Europe is serious about the ambitions it has set for itself: better health, technological leadership, preparedness, competitiveness, security, and a stronger place in the world.

These goals cannot be achieved with words alone. They require a much stronger Framework Programme, and within it a stronger ERC.

The ERC is already one of Europe’s clearest successes. It is recognised across the world. It attracts and retains outstanding researchers. It raises standards. It gives Europe a way to back the best ideas wherever they arise. But it is also heavily oversubscribed. Every year, excellent proposals cannot be funded. These are not weak proposals. Many are outstanding. The loss is not only to the individual researcher; it is a loss to Europe.

So I would like to say this clearly, especially here in Italy, with its great scientific tradition and its strong voice in Europe. We need Italian support for an ambitious FP10 and for a significantly higher ERC budget in the next Multiannual Financial Framework.

This is not a special request for researchers. It is an investment in Europe’s capacity to act. If we want the discoveries that will protect lives in the future, we have to make the decision now.

The same long-term view applies to the great health problems before us. Better pandemic preparedness, new antibiotics, progress on neurodegenerative disease, cancer medicine, and public trust in health systems all depend on work done long before a result can be promised. They depend on virology and immunology, but also on chemistry, data science, social science, communication, and institutions. Public health is not only biology. It is also society.

This is one reason I worry when research policy becomes too impatient. Impatience can produce activity. It can produce initiatives, calls, platforms and strategies. Some of them are useful. But impatience does not necessarily produce discovery.

Discovery needs discipline, but it also needs freedom. It needs accountability, but not constant steering. It needs evaluation, but not evaluation that becomes a substitute for judgement.

The ERC’s model is built on peer review. It is not perfect. Panels work hard, but they make difficult decisions under pressure. Excellent proposals sometimes cannot be funded because the budget is not large enough. We know this, and we try to improve our processes.

But the central principle is sound: scientific quality should be judged by people who understand the science, and funding decisions should be protected from short-term political fashion.

That protection is not a privilege for scientists. It is a service to society. It means that society has a place in its research system for questions whose value is not yet obvious. It means that Europe keeps open the possibility of surprise.

Nobody can tell you exactly which discoveries made today will protect lives in twenty years. We can identify important problems. We can build strong institutions. We can fund excellent people. But we cannot fully plan discovery.

That is not a weakness. It is the nature of research. The task of policy is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to build systems that can make good use of uncertainty.

So we should invest steadily, not only dramatically. Crisis funding has its place, but it cannot replace the slow accumulation of expertise.

We should support people, not only topics. Topics change. Good researchers learn, adapt, and open new directions.

We should keep the link between research and public purpose, but we should not reduce public purpose to short-term deliverables.

And we should make Europe attractive to researchers from everywhere. Science has always moved across borders. Health threats move across borders too.

Let me end with the applicants in the room, or those who are thinking of applying.

The ERC is demanding. It should be. The competition is hard, and not everyone will succeed the first time. But applying can still be worthwhile if the idea is ready. It forces clarity. It asks you to explain why your question deserves time, money and trust.

And when it works, it can change a career. It can give a researcher the space to build a team, to take a risk, to enter a new field, or to pursue an idea that would otherwise remain too fragile.

For institutional leaders, I would ask you to create the conditions in which such people can thrive: not only the already confident ones, not only those who know how to navigate the system, but also those who need encouragement, time and serious support.

Europe’s scientific future will not be shaped only in Brussels. It will be shaped in places like this: in institutes, universities, hospitals and laboratories; in the decisions made by directors and deans; in the time given to young researchers; in the trust placed in unusual ideas; in the willingness to keep funding knowledge before its use is fully visible.

The Istituto Superiore di Sanità was built on the idea that public health needs science. That idea is as true today as it was in the 1930s. But today we must add something more. Public health needs science that is strong enough, broad enough and free enough to surprise us.

If we want to protect lives, we must invest not only in what we already know we need.

We must invest in the knowledge that will make us ready for what we cannot yet see.

Thank you.