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06 September 2020With the Recovery Fund, the government aims to guarantee "opportunities for structural and adequate investments in research, in the face of a past, particularly in Italy, which has recorded mostly disorganized, occasional measures": this is what the Prime Minister said , Giuseppe Conte, speaking in Trieste at the closing ceremony of the EuroScience Open Forum, underlining that for "research to be at the service of the country, it needs planning, therefore continuity and certainty of investments".

In his speech, Conte underlined how the Covid emergency also makes "more urgent a reflection on the opportunity to push the research system towards a reconfiguration of its objectives, of its tools, to expand the effectiveness of its impact on society," on the economy, on the community, on the country system as a whole ".

"To maintain its effectiveness and its role in the world that the Covid emergency will give us back, the research system must adapt, must reconfigure itself through necessary innovations, capable of nourishing quality and competences the economic fabric and the social fabric ", remarked Conte, thus indicating" four fundamental objectives, which I consider really priority ".

"First of all - he explained - we must favor integrated, multidisciplinary, complex research; two, we must strengthen basic research; three, we must promote mission-oriented research: our researchers must be increasingly stimulated to give substance to their own research, dealing with the productive fabric, with society, placing oneself at the service of the real world, alongside institutions, businesses, the third sector, society, people. Fourth: we must bring research closer to training. The labor market demands up-to-date skills, adequate to the challenges and transformations underway, therefore the obsolescence of knowledge, which must be met with lifelong learning and with a mixed, inclusive university, requires that up-to-date skills be transferred in training courses and that this update is constant and accompany the various professionals throughout their development ".

"With respect to this pandemic - concluded the Prime Minister - the desirable contribution of an intellectual ideal is to recompose a shattering of gazes in the public space. We must recover the concept and sense of the unity of science and research, a a perspective vision that the single sciences alone cannot give us. A synthetic look also at the service of politics, called to make decisions of public interest for the common good ".

"Disillusionment" understood as mistrust in science, "can feed anti-scientific impulses that merge with radical distrust of experts. Anti-scientific impulses that are then reflected in the management of the pandemic by politics, even if this has the support of the best scientists ", underlined Conte.

'' The emergency of the pandemic has made public opinion more attentive to relations between science and politics '', concluded the premier.

The President @GiuseppeConteIT speaks at the closing ceremony of the EuroScience Open Forum # ESOF2020

🔴 Live from Trieste https://t.co/smgDU2lVzG

- Palazzo_Chigi (@Palazzo_Chigi) September 6, 2020