Edoardo Boncinelli is full professor of Biology and Genetics at the university Vita-Salute in Milan. He has been Director of SISSA-ISAS International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste and Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of Development at the Scientific Institute San Raffaele in Milan. A physicist by training, he worked in the field of genetics and molecular biology of higher animals and man, first in Naples, at the International Institute of Genetics and Biophysics (IIGB) of CNR, where he progressed through most of his scientific career, and subsequently in Milan. He is a member of Academia Europea and EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organisation, and a past-president of the Italian Society of Biophysics and Molecular Biology. In 2005 he received the EMBO Award for Communication in the Life Sciences. His research interests, all revolving around embryonic development of Vertebrates, range from the very early determination of body axis to the formation and subdivision of the cerebral cortex. His personal interests have progressively drifted toward the study of mind and higher mental functions. Edoardo Boncinelli has significantly contributed to our understanding of biological mechanisms of embryonic development in higher animals and man. In 1985, he was among the first to grasp the significance of the novel discoveries on the genetic control of drosophila development and to try and apply them to the study of human beings. His group identified and characterised a gene family, the 39 HOX homeogenes, controlling the correct development of the trunk, from neck to tail. These findings are recognised as landmarks of the biology of this time, if not of everytime. From 1991, he undertook the study of the developing brain and cerebral cortex, identifying a couple of additional homeogene families playing a major role in the underlying processes, in health and disease.

Boncinelli writes on "Le scienze" and Il Corriere delle Sera.

His most recent publications include Come nascono le idee (2008), Dialogo su scienza e etica (2008), Il Male. Storia naturale e sociale della sofferenza (2007), Tempo delle cose, tempo della vita, tempo dell'anima (2006).

In his recent book, Il Male. Storia naturale e sociale della sofferenza (Evil. A natural and social history of suffering, 2007), Edoardo Boncinelli states that human beings put a number of different things together in the same category, which they then label as "evil". Fear is one of these. But evil is nothing more than the difference between what is and what we expect, which would thus be Good. From a biological point of view, man is truly a very special animal, with self-awareness, a highly developed cerebral cortex and structured language. He has a certain mental image of the world, an image that contains concepts, categories and even value judgements. It is an image that clashes with a reality that almost never fulfils his expectations. It is here that the fear facing a reality that we did not anticipate arises and this is where evil is born.

To WWS, Edoardo Boncinelli brings his experience as a physicist, biologist and geneticist who constantly deals with fear, including in the form of insecurity deriving from the contradiction between what actually is and what we would like it to be.

Today as never before, science makes us afraid. Men and women find themselves the victims of conflicting feelings. On the one hand they are exposed to the allure of advancing knowledge, with results that seem to go far beyond human expectations, yet on the other, they fear the lack of certainty that defines their identity. The history of mankind has been marked by a progressive loss of certainty since its dawn, a consequence of undoubtedly enormous strides in the field of science. The Copernican revolution, for example, pushed humans out from the centre of the universe. There were enormous implications for the way we considered nature; nature as a place created for mankind was transformed to merely a place where humans happened to live. And then Darwin's theory of evolution removed humans from their safe place at the pinnacle of creation.

With the advent of genetics first and genetic engineering later, human beings were able to grasp the mechanisms of heredity and the way genes work. Everything that followed led to great success in understanding living beings. Enormous progress in practical applications resulted. The tools that came out of this process are not qualitatively different from the ones that existed previously, but they are much more powerful quantitatively, and to some people this is a source of worry. And genetics seems of offer a simplified image of human beings as objects, where it seems that we can meddle with every single component. And so genetics seems to be taking away another element of man's security - that of liberty.

On the other hand, man instinctively - and biologically, says Boncinelli - tries to avoid liberty, because this means responsibility. So now the unforeseeable, sometimes perceived as a threat to the very survival of humans, has joined the fear of the unknown. This fear derives from the difficulty in making decisions that can have unimaginable and unforeseeable repercussions, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, on the future of humanity. But human beings are, in fact, also the driving force behind genetic engineering and only they can take on the responsibility of not allowing themselves to be overwhelmed by the new research tools. In this case, the power that men and women must wield can be a source of fear when they find themselves faced with a range of possibilities that which probably have consequences that cannot be reversed. Boncinelli says that if it is true that people feel this fear more acutely today than in the past, this is because as time goes on, science has come increasingly closer to the "real o manufactured" needs of people. Most of them are relatively uninterested in the movement of Jupiter's satellites or whether or not a supernova explodes, but they can feel alarmed when science touches problems closely related to the health of our bodies and souls.

In the book E ora? La dimensione umana e le sfide della scienza (And now? The human dimension and the challenges of science, 2000), where Boncinelli dialogues with the philosopher Umberto Galimberti on the relationship between science and ethics, he states that fear is the other face of desire, a morbid desire change, accompanied by the terror that it will happen. Here fear is fortunately also a push towards exploration. Fears are part of our existence and the job of man is one of reducing risks when we have no absolute remedy for them. "Science", in this case, is nothing but all the techniques that human beings have developed, so that they need not be afraid to be successful and survive.