Translator: Riccardo Sasso Reviewer: Michele Gianella
Every object of our daily experience
has a long evolutionary history behind it.
The web was born in 1991
but the research that led to the internet began in 1969.
RNA is a molecule discovered in 1961,
studied as a possible therapy in the fight against cancer
during the 70s,
a research which however has not yet achieved full success.
And again, the International Space Station
has been hosting for 20 years now combustion experiments in zero gravity:
What will they be for?
in an as yet undefined future to design vehicles, planes and cars,
capable of consuming less fuel
thus having a lower environmental impact.
We could give many other examples, because the history of scientific research
is dotted with inventions
that have seen the light and have changed our lives
many years after they were conceived.
Indeed, this seems to be the unwritten rule of science.
There is a time - a needed, undefined, but always long time -
before researchers' free thought and curiosity,
generate something that then truly meets a need,
something that can solve a problem
that may arise suddenly and fatally.
There is a constant in the work of researchers,
and it is the incessant pursuit of their intuition.
If you ask 100, 1,000, 10,000 researchers
of any field and any discipline,
they will all say the same:
being able to follow that intuition
is the greatest gift that life has thrown at them.
It is essential for them.
They literally followed what Socrates said:
a life without research is not worth living.
Because research is closely linked to freedom of thought,
and researchers, like us all, want to leave a sign of himself,
and he has nothing to prove it but his untameable genius.
There is no fluke in research:
there is talent meeting opportunity.
And there are days and nights of endless, hidden work,
made up of many intuitions
but also of dead ends, sterile hypothesis, U-turns,
until the dots connect in a coherent design.
A researcher has ahead of him a mostly unknown path,
but beside being aware of the spatial dimension
given by his specific knowledge and skills,
the temporal dimension is less well known,
indeed he really doesn't care:
he concentrates on the pure advancement of knowledge,
without immediate applicability.
He knows that slow growth allows deep roots.
Researchers is incorruptible,
they don't run tests that prove them right;
on the contrary, they refute their own theories,
to strengthen them, make them more robust
and therefore reproducible and shareable.
When in 2017 Michele, Pietro and I came up with the idea of founding a company
on the basis of our research idea,
we honestly had no idea of the dimension of our journey.
Yes, we set off with ourbaggage
given by our knowledge, our skills
in the field of biotechnologies, nanotechnologies,
but we also had a lot of uncertainty, fear,
but an awareness:
that our newly born company
had to immediately express its full potential.
It was born free -
and it was literally born under the stairs,
in Michele's garage -
but immediately free to grow in every direction,
and to be able to collect and make flourish
every smallest seed of knowledge
we’dencountered along our path.
We called it Nanomnia,
because nanometric is the order of magnitude
of all living beings, at the moment of conception.
In summary, what we do?
we create researchers.
Yes, in the long run, we create researchers.
In everyday life we create nanoparticles,
i.e. microscopic, nanoscopic structures,
nanoscopic vesicles
where we encorporate active ingredients of various kinds.
They can be drugs, cosmetics, agriproducts or other industrial compounds
and by incorporating them, encapsulating them,
we accompany them, conveying them during the course of their action,
up to their specific target
which can be a plant, a pathogenic insect,
a microorganism, a tissue of the human body.
The peculiarity is that the shell we incapsulate them in
is completely natural, completely biodegradable,
completely free of microplastics.
To make a comparison - a disproportionate one, we already know -
with those researchers
who from studies on RNA as a therapeutic molecule for cancer
paved the way for RNA as a drug in vaccines,
our story has a different beginning too,
and from the studies of nanoparticles used for neurodegenerative diseases,
we then applied our technology
to another area,
with an urgent need
for precision processes and low-impact measurements,
namely agriculture and crop protection.
We have entered the groove traced before us, by someone else.
What we do was already done by someone else before us
but with other processes, methods, technologies,
above all with other plastic-based materials,
which therefore do not biodegrade completely,
generating a residue that seeps in the ground,
enters the groundwater,
ends up in the food we consume
and therefore in our body.
The fact is that in 2017, when we founded Nanomnia,
we didn't know we would contribute our technology
to a transformative process,
we didn't know that our plastic-free technology
would really be needed shortly thereafter.
Yes, because two years later, in 2019,
Europe, as part of a series of environmental policies,
issued various provisions,
according to which within a few years products won't hit EU shelves
but those that comply with a series of requirements
in terms of health, sustainability, safety
and among these requirements, is the absence of microplastics, also.
We didn't know this when we founded Nanomnia
two years earlier.
We founded it knowing that we had something beautiful and good in hand,
good for everyone.
We founded it over years full of intuitions,
but also of dead ends,
many U-turns.
Years in which we were extremely ahaed
of market strategies,
environmental policies
and all these dynamics that obviously we as researchers did not know.
But at a certain point, they started knocking on our door:
big companies, big players,
those who hold large shares of the markets they belong to
and needed our technology, free of microplastics,
to keep their products on the market.
And at that point we became strategic.
We become "the" choice.
There is no fluke in research.
There is talent meeting opportunity.
The values we believed in have generated value
for others, bigger, much bigger than us.
And the echo of what we generated was able to expand
with a much greater resonance than our expectations.
Before we were very small, now we are just small,
but without a long and broad perspective
we would never have been able to resist the struggles of doing business
even when these had become unsustainable,
or when the effort was much greater
than our energies and resources.
We're here tonight to talk about sustainability.
But in your opinion, how can research be related to sustainability?
I asked myself that and for me the answer is simple.
Just as research does not give results overnight,
so sustainability cannot be improvised too.
A sustainable choice
should never be made under urgency or emergency.
Indeed, it should be foreseen well in advance,
fully knowing that man is by nature a consumer:
he devours and consumes everything he finds in his path,
regardless of tomorrow.
Research instead generates sustainability, because it is forward-looking.
Because research knows how to look ahead in time,
how to identify and predict the possible developments of a situation
and perhaps mitigate or exploit the consequences.
Sustainability generated by research
is the ability to develop new thinking,
to explore, to pursue new paths,
verified by rigorous and in-depth experimentation.
To move from the laboratory scale,
which is a steep, tiring, dark, narrow, but unavoidable staircase,
to then move onto a large scale, for the benefit of all, for the common good.
But to generate these fruits, to generate sustainability,
research must be supported.
And how ?
With science education, vision education,
intellectual honesty education.
Recent years have taught us
that both basic and applied research
must have a leading role in the development of a social culture,
as those who govern a community:
with wisdom, with a sense of responsibility,
with foresight
which is that ability to predict the future,
to worry about the future;
is the virtue which allows men, and researchers in particular,
to read events in relation to the action of men.
Knowing how to process the present and guide future choices,
even if far away.
In this sense, foresight is also widesight,
it is the ability to see not only ahead of ourselves,
but also around ourselves,
the ability to embrace new, different solutions,
points of view and different perspectives
for the common good.
This teaches us the experience of research,
and we don't need to be giants to do it, nor even the most relevant in the room.
We need to cultivate freedom, the free gift of science,
we need to make knowledge swarm,
and selflessly disseminating it back to everyone,
for everyone's good.
Thank you.
(Applause)