The foundation of the Istituto di Sanità Pubblica

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a number of institutions whose aim was to promote hygiene in underdeveloped countries. As John Farley has pointed out, Wickliffe Rose, director of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1913 to 1923, aimed to make physicians, politicians and public opinion sensitive to the need to establish public-health services.Footnote ¹ By contrast, Rose's successor, Fred Russell, stressed the importance of fundamental scientific research. According to Farley, the weakness of the Rockefeller Foundation's health policy during the 1930s was partly due to the tension between these two opposite strategies. The outcome was that in the 1920s and 1930s the Rockefeller Foundation supported very different kinds of institution, though they mostly mirrored Rose's vision.Footnote ² This proved to be the case for the ISP.

In 1924, Lewis W. Hackett was sent to Italy to foster the development of public health and scientific research to fight malaria, endemic in many southern areas of the country.Footnote ³ However, the mission proved to be somewhat complicated because of the rivalries among Italian scientists and Italian institutions engaged in the fight against the disease.Footnote ⁴ Furthermore, the regime was not very keen to accept foreign help, particularly in this field. According to Fascist propaganda, there was no need for further fundamental research in malariology, and only a better application of the available knowledge was necessary.Footnote ⁵ As Hackett remarked, the field-studies approach in the fight against malaria was poorly considered.Footnote ⁶ The Italians dreamt of an international study centre for the fight against malaria, but Fred Russell pointed out that the aim of the Rockefeller Foundation was limited to helping the Italian government to organize the fight against malaria.Footnote ⁷

As a result, from 1925 Hackett began to organize a number of field stations in collaboration with Alberto Missiroli.Footnote ⁸ The following year, an agreement between the Rockefeller Foundation and the governor of Rome led to the setting up in Rome of the Stazione Sperimentale per la Lotta contro la Malaria (Experimental Station for the Fight against Malaria), which would coordinate the work of the other field stations. The Experimental Station comprised an entomological and a micrographic laboratory, a museum, a library and a propaganda office. Its aims were the fight against the Anopheles mosquitoes by means of chemical compounds and field control of the health conditions of the population.Footnote ⁹

Missiroli and Hackett intended the Experimental Station as a temporary institution to be absorbed by the Italian public-health system.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, they aimed to transform the Experimental Station into a national institute of health.Footnote ¹¹ In 1930, an agreement with the Italian government was finally reached and the Rockefeller Foundation consented to fund an entirely new institute.Footnote ¹² However, Missiroli and Hackett diverged on the aims of the new institute. Hackett thought that research at the institute should be related to practical application;Footnote ¹³ Missiroli, in contrast, gave priority to fundamental research. In 1930, Hackett expressed, against Missiroli's will, his intention to develop an international centre against malaria at the new institute.Footnote ¹⁴

The Chemical Laboratory of Public Health, the malaria station, the Radium Institute of the University of Rome and the other public-health laboratories were integrated and transformed into the new Institute of Public Health, the Istituto di Sanità Pubblica, or ISP, inaugurated in 1934.Footnote ¹⁵ As was customary for the Rockefeller Foundation, the construction of the buildings and other infrastructure were supported under the condition that the local government undertook the maintenance of the institution.

The Regio Decreto Legge (Royal Decree) of 11 January 1934 established that the new institute was mainly devoted to the control of foods and drugs, the production of sera and vaccines and the training of personnel. The ISP comprised eight divisions: four laboratories for radium, chemistry, malariology and microbiology; the health engineering, epidemiology and prophylaxis sections; a library; and a museum. The laboratories were in charge of investigations related to public-health needs, while the sections had official advisory duties.Footnote ¹⁶ The first director of the ISP was Dante de Blasi, professor of hygiene of the University of Rome and president of the Medicine Committee of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR – National Research Council).

The rise of Marotta

Although the newly created institute was initially designed to meet the aims of the Rockefeller philanthropic enterprise,Footnote ¹⁷ its mission soon changed. This shift was accomplished by a series of acts that changed the administrative shape of the institute. Originally, the institute should have been ruled by a committee composed of the heads of the laboratories and the sections, plus the head of the Department of Public Health, who would have also acted as director of the institute.Footnote ¹⁸ On 28 February 1935 a Regio Decreto Legge introduced the position of director of the ISP.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Penso, this change was due to the manoeuvring of Domenico Marotta,Footnote ²⁰ who at that time served as director of the Chemical Laboratory within the institute.Footnote ²¹ In July, he was appointed director of the Institute.Footnote ²² Marotta had studied chemistry in Palermo, where he graduated in 1910.Footnote ²³ In 1911, Marotta moved to Rome, where he was appointed Emanuele Paternò's assistant at the Chemical Institute of the University of Rome.Footnote ²⁴ Marotta became Paternò's right-hand man, charged with several duties; he also worked with him at the Chemical Laboratory of the Public Health Department, the Agrarian Station, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Gazzetta Chimica Italiana (which later became the official journal of the Italian Chemistry Society).Footnote ²⁵ At the outbreak of the First World War, Italian chemists were mobilized. Paternò was a member of the Italian committee for chemical warfare.Footnote ²⁶ He soon realized the high scientific and technological level reached by the United States, which he deemed superior even to the German techno-scientific complex.Footnote ²⁷ Marotta also had the chance to get a closer look at the modern model of organization exhibited by American science. The end of the First World War and the following Fascist dictatorship dramatically changed the scenario. Paternò never adhered to the new regime, remaining faithful to the liberal monarchy. By contrast, his young and ambitious assistant took the Fascist side; this helped Marotta to strengthen his power and continue his ascent.

In 1932, on the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, a great propaganda exhibition on the Fascist Revolution took place at the Colosseum.Footnote ²⁸ The Italian Society of Chemistry joined in the celebrations by publishing an essay collection concerning the Progresses of the Italian Chemical Industry in the First Ten Years of the Fascist Revolution. Marotta concluded the preface by praising ‘the Man who is building, starting from the foundations, the fate of Italy’, Benito Mussolini.Footnote ²⁹ In 1938, Marotta was also the secretary of the Tenth International Congress of Chemistry, an event that involved the entire Italian chemical community and was aimed at showing the world the results attained by Fascist chemistry.

Under Marotta's directorship the ISP was transformed into an autocratically led institution devoted mainly to scientific research. Administrative rules changed: while the directors of the laboratories initially reported to the director of the Health Division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs,Footnote ³⁰ a new act in July 1937 established that they report only to the director of the institute.Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, the new rule cancelled the clause that prescribed that all investigations carried out in the institute be related to public health. Researchers of the institute were now free of any constraint.Footnote ³² Within this setting, the director acted as a sort of mediator between the political power and the scientists. Marotta turned out to be very effective in getting money and equipment. Free from administrative tasks, researchers could focus on their research. Apparently, no researcher complained about the new situation.

Lewis Hackett expressed his concern about the change of the mission of the institute in a report to Wilbur Sawyer, head of the Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation: the new institute did not resemble what the Rockefeller Foundation had had in mind; that is, a school of public health with an organized faculty.Footnote ³³ In 1939, Hackett also judged that teaching at the ISP was poor and that the institute had parted from its mission in public health. John Farley believes that the ISP/ISS never functioned as a public-health school because of the inability of the regime to boost scientific research.Footnote ³⁴ However, Farley has probably been misled by Hackett's judgement of 1939. As Stapleton has pointed out, a number of Rockefeller Foundation reports written after 1945 expressed disappointment with the Italian government's orientation of the institute toward basic research instead of field operations.Footnote ³⁵

In the following sections, we will show that it was Marotta who knowingly oriented the institute toward fundamental research with an interest in industrial production, though he could fully deploy his vision only after the war, since the Fascist regime put most of the resources into military efforts.

The ISS during Fascism

Two episodes reveal how Marotta placed the institute at the centre of the Italian scientific research system. These episodes are the construction of a particle accelerator and the acquisition of an electron microscope: two large and costly instruments that were not strictly related to medical investigations for public-health and control tasks.

The accelerator (a Cockcroft–Walton machine) was built in 1939,Footnote ³⁶ following major support provided by the Radium Laboratory (later called the Physics Laboratory) for the research of Enrico Fermi's group on artificial radioactivity. These investigations needed large amounts of money, modern equipment and the supply of rare chemicals.Footnote ³⁷ However, when the accelerator was ready Fermi had already fled to the United States.

In 1939, the ISS also bought an electron microscope from Siemens, one of the first ever built and the most powerful tool in microscopy at the time; only two of these microscopes were shipped outside Germany.Footnote ³⁸ In 1943, following the fall of the Fascist regime and during the Nazi occupation, the electron microscope was requisitioned and sent to Germany. It never reached its final destination, probably destroyed by Allied bombardment. Before the instrument was commandeered, though, researchers and technicians of the ISS copied the plans of the microscope, and in 1946 they were able to build a new one.Footnote ³⁹

In addition, in October 1941 the Istituto di Sanità Pubblica changed its name to Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Higher Institute of Health, ISS).Footnote ⁴⁰ Rather significantly, the new name dropped the ‘public’ element, in favour of the ‘higher’ rank that the institute was meant to reach within the academic community.

Marotta's project was nonetheless hindered by Mussolini's expansionistic policy.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia and consequently the institute's efforts were devoted to the training of military personnel and the production of vaccines against tropical diseases.Footnote ⁴² Marotta did not oppose the political directives coming directly from the government. On the contrary, he tightened his ties with the regime.

In 1937, he published a translation of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, with a preface by Giovanni Gentile. Gentile was the most important intellectual of Fascism: professor of history of philosophy until 1911 in Palermo and later, in Rome, minister of education (1922–1924), in 1937 Gentile was the president of the Fascist Institute of Culture and vice-president of the Italian Encyclopedia Institute. His preface was surely an honour for a book whose introduction, written by Marotta himself, explicitly praised Mussolini's politics and military conquests.Footnote ⁴³ The majority of Italians silently turned their back on Fascism only in 1943, when it appeared clear that the war was lost.Footnote ⁴⁴ Marotta was most likely one of them.

The end of the war and the penicillin factory

After the end of Mussolini's dictatorship in 1943, Marotta became a fervent supporter of the new anti-Fascist cause. Indeed, he helped the partisans and the Allied provisional government and carefully collected evidence of his patriotic behaviour, claiming, for example, that he had managed to hide radium from the Germans.Footnote ⁴⁵ Marotta was also successful in avoiding the transfer in early 1944 of the ISS to a new site within the Repubblica Sociale Italiana.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although his anti-Fascist stance seems self-constructed, Marotta was able to succeed in defending his behaviour before the Commissione per l'Epurazione, the court in charge of ‘purging’ Fascist bureaucrats from the new Italian administration.Footnote ⁴⁷

The support, again, of the Rockefeller Foundation, who turned to the ISS to fight the recrudescence of malaria, and of the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), eased the transition to the post-war situation.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1946, in the context of a worldwide policy, the UNRRA provided a good amount of money for industrial reconstruction. In Italy, the UNRRA's help had at least two effects on scientific research. At a national level, as a condition for receiving the funds, the UNRRA forced the Italian government to give 150 million lira to the CNR.Footnote ⁴⁹ Further, Italy was part of the UNRRA's effort to boost antibiotic production, by creating new penicillin production plants in five European countries: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Italy, Poland and the Soviet Union (Byelorussia and Ukraine). At that time, due to various factors including military secrecy, penicillin was produced on an industrial scale only in North America, resulting in a chronic shortage of supplies around the world.Footnote ⁵⁰

One of these UNRRA plants was destined for Italy, and in 1946 an agreement was signed with the Italian government (through the ACIS, the High Commission for Hygiene and Public Health): a suitable facility for the plant was to be constructed by the state, but under the condition that the plant was to be used only for national production (no export was allowed), and that it could not be let to private industries.Footnote ⁵¹ The ISS was the chosen site, and its scientists and technicians were to run the factory.Footnote ⁵² Gino Bergami, the high commissioner for hygiene and health, clearly stated that the government wanted to avoid the mistakes committed by the French. As the Pasteur Institute had not been able to produce the penicillin needed by the country, the French government had to rely on private industries. According to Bergami, the Italian government could count on the ISS. Furthermore, state penicillin would be cheaper.Footnote ⁵³

It is worth noting that the Centrist governments considered pharmaceuticals one of the strategic sectors of national industry.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pharmaceuticals, the car industry and agriculture were the only three sectors that were protected by high tariffs after the liberalization of tariffs of the so-called Merzagora Plan in 1950.Footnote ⁵⁵

Robert Bud has clearly explained how, in the British post-war imagination, penicillin represented a symbol of the reconstruction of the country.Footnote ⁵⁶ In Italy, penicillin played a slightly different role. On the one hand, as De Gasperi underlined on the inauguration day, it was a gift from the American friends, and therefore a propaganda weapon against the Communists. Nevertheless, the miracle drug was very difficult to find in Italy at that time.Footnote ⁵⁷ In a successful play performed in 1945, Napoli Milionaria, Eduardo de Filippo represented how dramatic it could be to get penicillin in Italy. Such a mixture of emotional and rational reasons probably played some role in De Gasperi's choice to build a state penicillin factory.

Soon after the agreement with the UNRRA, Ernst Boris Chain was invited, under the auspices of the British Council, to deliver a series of lectures in several cities. In Rome, Chain lectured at the ISS on 5 and 6 March 1947. Yet the ISS at the time seemed to Chain ‘a large building containing many beautiful, but rather empty looking laboratories and, though lavishly equipped, showed little sign of scientific activity of any originality’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Chain's memory, Marotta not only asked him for advice about the future penicillin plant, but also clearly stated the need to establish a department of modern biochemistry.Footnote ⁵⁹

On the subject of the penicillin factory, Chain informed Marotta that the UNRRA equipment was already obsolete and that consequently it would have been uneconomical to set it up.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, Chain saw no reason to compete with private industries in the production of the drug. In his opinion, it was ‘eminently worthwhile to utilize the UNRRA funds and some of the donated equipment for the purpose of building a research centre for chemical microbiology’.Footnote ⁶¹ Gualandi, one of ‘Chain's Babies’, remembered that it would have been much less expensive to buy the few tons of penicillin needed by the army than to put up a penicillin plant. However, the plant allowed Marotta to set up an international centre for biochemistry and to control the pharmaceutical system.Footnote ⁶²

Marotta, however, had a wider view of the plant. As he pointed out in a letter to De Gasperi of 20 October 1948, he aimed to build an integrated research and production system including scientific laboratories, a pilot plant and a large factory.Footnote ⁶³ The pilot plant was to be used for training personnel.Footnote ⁶⁴ Furthermore, according to Filomena Nitti-Bovet, Marotta also dreamt of a pharmacological hospital,Footnote ⁶⁵ thus integrating research, clinical facilities and pharmaceutical production in a single public institution.

Chain understood Marotta's ideas perfectly. At that time, Chain was trying to convince the British authorities to build state-sponsored research laboratories, integrated with a penicillin factory, where research and production units were strictly controlled and organized. The factory was to fund the research laboratories. In Chain's mind, this had to be the first step toward a state pharmaceutical industry and the only way to compete with American private giants such as Merck & Co. Inc. and American Cyanamid.Footnote ⁶⁶ Chain convinced the British minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, to support his ideas. Bevan, however, failed to convince his colleagues in the government.Footnote ⁶⁷

The story of the penicillin factory reveals that the Italian government firmly wanted a small factory dependent on the ISS, but that it was not very keen to transform the ISS into an integrated research and large-scale production centre. As mentioned above, the equipment provided by the UNRRA was already antiquated. Moreover, only part of it had been shipped by 1947.Footnote ⁶⁸ A controversy arose between officials of Aid from the United States of America (AUSA) and the ISS,Footnote ⁶⁹ as the Americans argued that the money should have been spent by 30 September 1947.Footnote ⁷⁰ The ISS argued that only part of the equipment had been shipped and, moreover, without any instruction. As some machinery had not been shipped and was apparently no longer available, the Italian UNRRA delegation offered that the ISS replace it with money.Footnote ⁷¹ The budget for the factory was estimated at 1,050 million liras. Of this total, 300 million was provided by the UNRRA, 300 million by AUSA and the rest by the Italian government.Footnote ⁷² This sum would cover the expenditures of the whole project: scientific laboratories, the pilot plant and the factory.Footnote ⁷³

Due to pressure from the Americans,Footnote ⁷⁴ the construction of the new building officially began on 12 February 1948, with a ceremony attended by the Italian prime minister, the US ambassador and the high commissioner for hygiene and public health.Footnote ⁷⁵

Meanwhile, two companies had started up projects to build penicillin plants in Italy. Cisitalia was planning to produce penicillin by exploiting patents held by a Danish company, Loevens Kemiske Fabrik, manufacturing it under the name Leo.Footnote ⁷⁶ Another company, Laboratory Palma, was also building an antibiotic factory in association with Squibb.Footnote ⁷⁷

Leon Dayton, director of the US foreign-aid mission to Italy,Footnote ⁷⁸ was disappointed by the slow pace of the work on the factory.Footnote ⁷⁹ On 1 September 1948 a meeting took place in the office of the head of the prime minister's cabinet, Francesco Miraglia, and Dayton argued that since the production from Palma's laboratories would cover national needs, it was pointless to build a state factory. He proposed instead to use the money for scientific laboratories and the pilot plant. Marotta pointed out that Palma was nothing but an Italian licensee of Squibb, subtly suggesting that ERP (European Recovery Program, also known as the Marshall Plan) officials were supporting US economic interests. The ISS director further underlined the importance of penicillin, a drug whose production could not be left solely to private manufacturers. What if private foreign companies left the country? In Dayton's view, imports could have covered Italian needs.Footnote ⁸⁰ Marotta's worries actually became a reality in 1950–1951, when the US restricted the export of antibiotics because of the Korean War. This led to a shortage, and Italian private production (Leo's) only met a fraction of the country's requirements. The shortage was only overcome when the state tackled the issue, directly buying the medicine from suppliers, and negotiating with the American government to obtain import licences.Footnote ⁸¹ At the same meeting, Marotta claimed that the pilot plant did not make any sense without the factory. In his words, a rehearsal that was not followed by the show was useless.Footnote ⁸² In the end, the government decided to carry on the project of the penicillin factory.Footnote ⁸³

Marotta was dreaming of a great industrial and scientific integrated research centre. In October 1948 he officially asked De Gasperi to provide extra money in order to build a larger factory. According to Marotta, the state factory, as it was originally planned, could only satisfy one-twentieth of the needs of the country. Another 850 million lira would assure fifteen-twentieths of current Italian needs.Footnote ⁸⁴ One should consider that the Italian pharmaceutical industry derived its major technological innovations either from joint ventures with foreign firms or from technology transfer from abroad.Footnote ⁸⁵ Marotta's plan really could have introduced a new model of integration between science and industry in Italy. Marotta probably thought that he could use American dollars to carry out his plan, as he had done in the 1930s. The agreement with the American government, however, explicitly ruled out large-scale production and competition with private industry. The American government was not the Rockefeller Foundation and De Gasperi was not Mussolini.

De Gasperi could have negotiated a new agreement with the United States administration, but the whole project did not fit with De Gasperi's political view. Indeed, as John Krige has stressed, Washington thought that rebuilding European science was crucial in order to face the communist threat. By contrast, De Gasperi did not believe that large investments in the reorganization of Italian science would contribute to solving the problems of the country.Footnote ⁸⁶ Marotta, however, did not give up on his project. In 1957, Marotta asked the head of the ACIS for permission to sell the institute's surplus production of antibiotics to private industries, suggesting full-scale industrial production of antibiotics.Footnote ⁸⁷

By early 1947, Ernst Boris Chain was in charge of the development of the microbiology centre and the pilot plant. Marotta left Chain free to organize the plant and all the related facilities, and Chain worked for the new institute even before an official agreement was reached. He planned the laboratories in full detail, tried to do some ‘headhunting’ among his scientific acquaintances, and supervised all the technical aspects of the construction. In 1950, the International Centre for Microbiological Chemistry, with its pilot plant facilities, began its activity, and the next year it was officially inaugurated: the prime minister himself, Alcide De Gasperi, attended the event.

According to Daniel Bovet, the penicillin plant could have served as a model for underdeveloped countries.Footnote ⁸⁸ In 1960, for example, a pilot plant was designed by ISS engineers upon request from the Central University of Caracas in Venezuela.Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, the penicillin plant worked for at least for one year as a training centre of the World Health Organization, and also as a reference centre for antibiotic standards.Footnote ⁹⁰ In 1964, a number of Pakistani technicians were trained at the pilot plant.Footnote ⁹¹ The ISS gained a significant international reputation in the field. A few requests for consulting services were also made from abroad (from Turkey,Footnote ⁹² and twice from YugoslaviaFootnote ⁹³), as well as from Italian firms.Footnote ⁹⁴ The institute also received requests for penicillin from Finland and from Hong Kong.Footnote ⁹⁵

Between 1955 and 1960, at the ISS, the production of 500,000 O.U. sodic penicillin vials averaged 572,762 pieces.Footnote ⁹⁶ After 1960, production was made on demand,Footnote ⁹⁷ as the availability of semi-synthetic penicillins resulted in lower demand for penicillin on the market.Footnote ⁹⁸

The ISS under Marotta's reign

During his directorship, Marotta tried to provide the institute with financial and administrative autonomy and a more flexible work organization. In 1948, the Consiglio di Stato rejected a legislative project to detach the ISS from the ACIS.Footnote ⁹⁹ Nevertheless, between 1949 and 1951 Marotta pulled political strings in order to undertake a reform of the ISS: the project was to make the ISS directly dependent on the Prime Minister's Office. He did not win this prize, though he managed to gain much power inside the institute, whose steering committee was to be dominated by Marotta and his collaborators inside the institute. Marotta also succeeded in making foreign diplomas equal to the Italian laurea a requirement for being hired at the ISS.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This would allow the recruitment of leading foreign scholars, avoiding the usual long and painstaking process of recruitment by public competition (concorsi pubblici).

The main instruments of Marotta's project were the Emanuele Paternò Foundation and the study centres. The Paternò Foundation was an institution founded by Marotta and financed with ISS funds. The researchers at the institute gave 50 per cent of the royalties earned by their patents to the Paternò Foundation. Since the foundation had an ambiguous legal status, Marotta could avoid legal constraints about royalties and, moreover, he was free to spend money without any bureaucratic control.

Between 1951 and 1957, three study centres were instituted: an International Microbiology Centre in 1951, a Centre for the Study of Fermentation Chemistry and Bacterial Growth in 1955 and a Centre for the Study and the Fight against Harmful Insects.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Since the study centres used personnel of the institute, they were actually part of the institute. However, as they were instituted by a notarial act and not by a state law, the management of the institute ruled them beyond administrative and legal control. Again, the study centres could hire (and also fire) researchers without being subject to complicated Italian regulations. In addition, the study centres could receive support from private institutions.Footnote ¹⁰²

Law 274 of 20 June 1952 officially changed the mission of the ISS. Article 1 read as follows:

The new mission reflects the view expressed by Marotta as early as 1943: ‘The first and most important task of the institute is scientific research’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

A new laboratory, the Therapeutic Chemistry Laboratory, was created in 1948 for Daniel Bovet and his wife.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Malariology Laboratory was shut down and replaced with a Parasitology Laboratory. In 1952, the Epidemiology Laboratory was shut and its competences were transferred to the Istituto Superiore di Statistica (Higher Institute of Statistics).Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The recruitment of Ernst Chain should, then, be framed in this grander scheme. Chain had a key role in connecting the ISS to the international research network in various fields of biology and chemistry, and personally invited many important scientists to lecture at the institute. Furthermore, Chain allowed collaborations between the ISS and several Italian and international pharmaceutical companies, such as Farmitalia, the Swedish Astra and the British Beecham. The collaboration with the latter, begun in 1955, eventually led to the discovery of 6-APA (the active nucleus of the penicillins) five years later, though the ISS did not benefit commercially from this achievement.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This left an ill feeling with the Italian researchers, though some scientific credit was acknowledged by Chain himself, and by the joint publication of a paper in Nature in January 1959.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Throughout his management of the institute, Marotta allowed the scientists extraordinary freedom: in research, in the recruitment of new personnel, in the day-to-day management of the lavishly equipped laboratories. Writing to Ernest Fourneau, former director of the Pasteur Institute, Filomena Nitti-Bovet (who left the Parisian establishment and came to work in the ISS soon after the Second World War) described the ISS's way of working in the following way:

The main features of Marotta's management of the ISS were a mix of autocratic management and defence of the institute. He always managed to keep control over the ISS, while inside the institute he left ample space for individual talent. Management activity did not leave any room for science: his name disappeared from the official journal of the institute, the Rendiconti.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The important results obtained gained the ISS international recognition and visibility. In 1957, Bovet won the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. It was a triumph for ‘Italian science’. Marotta played some part in Bovet's award, having proposed the Swiss-born chemist for the Nobel Prize in 1953, for his work on antihistamines and curare.Footnote ¹¹¹

Marotta's fall and the end of the golden age of the ISS

After De Gasperi's death in the late 1950s, Marotta became sympathetic with the newly formed alliance between the Socialist Party and the progressive wing of the Christian Democrats. Eventually, in 1963, the two parties formed the so-called centre-left government. Marotta's support for the new coalition is hardly surprising, for this political group tried to reform the main institutions of the country.Footnote ¹¹² This support for a specific group of politicians was returned. In 1960, under Fanfani's premiership, when Marotta was on the verge of retirement, some members of the Senate (including former members of De Gasperi's cabinets) proposed an ad hoc act in order to prolong his directorship of the ISS for five more years,Footnote ¹¹³ until he reached the age of eighty: the proposal was rejected.

One year later, in 1961, Marotta left the directorship of the ISS. The political protection he enjoyed did not prevent him from becoming the target of a lawsuit that broke in the spring of 1964, when he was seventy-eight years old. On 8 April Marotta was arrested. Arrest warrants were also issued for Giordano Giacomello, who served as director in the ISS after Marotta's retirement; and for two of Marotta's closest collaborators, the administrative director, Italo Domenicucci, and Adolfo Rossi, an administrative officer. All four were charged with embezzlement and with having falsified official documents. The lawsuit was filed after a press campaign attacked Marotta's management of the ISS.Footnote ¹¹⁴ An employee of the ISS, who had fought as a volunteer for the Fascist Repubblica Sociale Italiana, gave some documents proving illegal activities to Silvio Messinetti MP, who, by contrast, belonged to the Italian Communist Party (PCI). After an official inquiry presented to the minister of public health, Messinetti handed the documents to the party's newspaper, L'Unità.Footnote ¹¹⁵

In the subsequent chaos, the struggle quickly spread within the ISS, involving several researchers. Giuseppe Penso, a microbiologist and a long-standing employee of the ISS,Footnote ¹¹⁶ attacked Marotta's vision of the ISS, arguing that it should mainly have been a public-health and control centre, with little room for fundamental research.Footnote ¹¹⁷ On the other hand, Mario Ageno, head of the Physics Laboratory, argued that free and fundamental research was the best possible training for scientists who were to act as civil servants.Footnote ¹¹⁸

On 25 July 1965, Marotta was sentenced to five years and six months in prison. The allegations regarded the administration of the study centres of the ISS and the Paternò Foundation, and also the purchase of some equipment from Siemens. The Appeal Court, however, discharged the four defendants because of formal errors made in the first trial. The public prosecutor appealed to the Suprema Corte di Cassazione: the decision was overruled and a new trial in a different section of the Appeal Court of Rome was ordered.Footnote ¹¹⁹ On 12 June 1969 the Appeal Court sentenced Marotta to two years and eleven months.Footnote ¹²⁰ The Appeal Court judges trusted the nobility of Marotta's purpose – to increase scientific research at the ISS – while deeming Marotta's methods illegal. The judges harshly criticized the fact that Marotta had used the study centres and the Paternò Foundation as a private enterprise. According to the Appeal Court judgment, Marotta managed the ISS as if it were an American institution, where the director enjoyed the greatest freedom in expenditures.Footnote ¹²¹

In order to understand properly the allegations and the trial, one should remember the peculiar characteristics of the Italian legal order. As Stefano Rodotà recalls, Italian legal order followed the German Rechtsstaat model: legislation should be free of historical, political and social considerations. Any act carried out on behalf of the state had to be set within the framework of administrative law. This principle was intended as a way of protecting the citizen against the arbitrary power of bureaucracy. This approach led the state to rule over every detail of economic and social life,Footnote ¹²² as well as to produce a proliferation of laws and internal norms, resulting in normative confusion and consequently the attribution of great power to a corrupted bureaucracy.Footnote ¹²³ After the Second World War, normative confusion and corruption would contribute to determine constant intervention by the judicial power in Italian political and economic life. The management of scientific institutions was no exception.

Marotta's cause echoed internationally: a campaign of support spread worldwide, with a strong contribution by Chain. This is hardly surprising, since Chain himself was the target of public criticism over the collaboration with Beecham.Footnote ¹²⁴ Chain himself was eventually accused of offences against the court, because of some letters he wrote to the judges who made allegations against him. Furthermore, Chain was involved in the case because of some grants he had received from US agencies (the Agricultural Research Service and the NIH): the judges could not relate easily to the fact that, as is usually the case with this kind of grant, Chain spent the money without going through the convoluted system of Italian bureaucracy. Giacomello was thus questioned for allowing Chain to incur these ‘illegal’ expenses.

The end of the penicillin factory and the pilot plant

Marotta's creation hit hard times, and the ISS entered a state of virtual paralysis. The international ‘stars’, the pillars of the institute's strong reputation, were not there any more. Chain, in fact, had left the ISS in 1960, but kept collaborating with it until January 1965,Footnote ¹²⁵ while Bovet moved to the University of Sassari in 1964 after Marotta's failure to convince the president of the republic to appoint him director of the institute.Footnote ¹²⁶ As an official report complained, the two teams led by Chain and Bovet were dismantled when their work of previous years was reaching groundbreaking results.Footnote ¹²⁷

Chain's departure determined the fate of the pilot plant. Indeed, as explained in previous sections, the factory, the pilot plant and the International Microbiology Centre were thought of as an integrated research centre under Chain's directorship. Moreover, as already mentioned, the development of semi-synthetic penicillin, together with the availability of a new series of antibiotics, had rendered the factory antiquated. Thus the plants had to be restructured.

After Chain's departure, the pilot plant was exploited for research, though often the experiments no longer concerned antibiotics, but a wide range of topics within the broad field of microbiology: alkaloids, algae, micro-organism pigments, and oxidations and biological transformations of chemical compounds.Footnote ¹²⁸ With regard to the factory, in 1964 the director, Giovanni Battista Marini-Bettolo, investigated the possibility of working for private industries.Footnote ¹²⁹ An internal report by A. Carilli presented a number of possibilities for the future of the production facilities: the development of new antibiotics to help developing countries in cooperation with the World Health Organization; research on oil microbiology, with the Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI, the National Agency for Hydrocarbons); the study of microbes, jointly with (unspecified) space research agencies.Footnote ¹³⁰ These proposals were probably unrealistic, although they all were somehow related to the research that was then being carried out with the pilot plant. By contrast, Gualandi, in a briefing at the institute, proposed shutting down the pilot plant and focusing on antibiotics research and production.Footnote ¹³¹ The diverging opinions mirrored the lack of a clear strategy for the future of the pilot plant and the penicillin production plants after Chain's departure and Marotta's fall.

In 1964, a committee appointed by the health minister, Giacomo Mancini (Socialist Party), in order to prepare a reform law for the institute, argued that antibiotics production should not have been among the institute's duties.Footnote ¹³² The pilot plant was placed under the control of the institute's Biological Chemistry Laboratory.Footnote ¹³³ Although the reform law would only be approved in 1973, the factory and the pilot plants ceased antibiotics production in 1964.Footnote ¹³⁴

To sum up, the state penicillin factory had been too small to transform the ISS into an integrated industrial and research centre. At the end of their cycle, the production plants only worked three months a year.Footnote ¹³⁵ Moreover, not all the ISS scientists had shared Marotta's vision. Even Giuseppe Penso, the head of the microbiology laboratories, did not understand why scientific laboratories and industrial production at the ISS were integrated.Footnote ¹³⁶ As early as 1962, Penso and Intonti had commented that scientific research and industrial production were not compatible. In a letter to the director of the ISS, they proposed to detach the factory from the institute and either shut it down or create a state-operated industry outside the institute.Footnote ¹³⁷

Interestingly enough, while the ISS was dismantling its pilot plant, Chain was in his new department at Imperial College London, building a new pilot plant from scratch. Chain's young British collaborators had been trained at the pilot plant of the ISS for one year, and all the projects for the facilities were designed by the ISS engineer Renato Falini.Footnote ¹³⁸

Italian science policy in the 1960s and the decline of the ISS

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Italian economy skyrocketed.Footnote ¹³⁹ One of the key factors of the ‘economic miracle’ was that production plants had been updated without any cost for research, thanks to the introduction of more modern techniques that had already been implemented abroad.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Italian production plants being relatively recent, the introduction of new technological innovation had been quite easy.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The ‘economic miracle’, as the British press had defined the Italian economic growth of the 1950s, was based on the export of products that did not need much technology (textiles, furniture, leather, shoes, clothes) and on low- and medium-technology products: fridges, washing machines, cars and so on. By contrast, Italy imported high technology from abroad.Footnote ¹⁴² As discussed earlier, this was particularly relevant for the chemical and pharmaceutical industry, whose major technological innovations mostly derived either from joint ventures or from technology transfer from abroad.Footnote ¹⁴³ The collaboration between Chain's team at the ISS and the pharmaceutical companies was thus both unusual and significant.

By the beginning of the 1960s, however, politicians and technocrats supporting the centre-left project were fully aware that the technological and scientific gap between Italy and other countries could have undermined the conquests of the ‘economic miracle’. In 1961, the Central Office for Cultural Activities of Christian Democracy organized a Meeting on Science and Power.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In their joint introductory address, Giordano Giacomello, who had replaced Marotta as director of the ISS, and Franco Maria Malfatti MP expressed their concerns that the scientific gap between Italy and the USA was increasing.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Giacomello and Malfatti claimed that the scarce resources devoted to scientific research represented an internal weakness of the Italian industrial system, a sort of ‘shadow area’ of the Italian ‘economic miracle’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ According to them, state intervention was required to boost scientific research and to promote a stronger integration between science and industry, in order to support the country's competitiveness. Indeed, Giacomello and Malfatti pointed to a general restructuring of the Italian research system and of Italian universities. They also proposed to create an institute for applied technology following the model of a number of US institutes.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In the following years, however, the centre-left alliance failed in its goals. As Paul Ginsborg recalls, there were three different views beyond the common project: a corrective view, a structural view and a minimalist view. Christian Democrats such as Fanfani wanted some corrective reforms, while Pietro Nenni and the Socialists aimed to introduce structural reforms that would promote state control of the economy, a first step on the road to a socialist society. The net result was the paralysis of the centre-left alliance, due to internal divisions as well as to conservative and left-wing opposition.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Thus the centre-left alliance turned out to be unable to face the difficult economic situation generated by the fall of profits after 1965.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The centre-left alliance also failed to give to the universities and to the best scientific institutions, such as the ISS, a central role in the Italian productive system of the 1960s. On 22 October 1963, the Socialist members of parliament Antonio Giolitti and Riccardo Lombardi officially asked the health minister to promote a law in order to defend scientific research at the ISS.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Giolitti and Lombardi were worried that the departure of Chain and Bovet would cause a general exodus of their young talented students.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The two MPs argued that although theoretical research was not an official duty of the ISS,Footnote ¹⁵² due to its international relevance the government should have promoted it.Footnote ¹⁵³ (It is worth noting that in 1947 Riccardo Lombardi, the head of the left wing of the Socialist Party, had supported the creation of the penicillin factory of the ISS by underlining its potential in boosting scientific research.Footnote ¹⁵⁴) The health minister, Angelo Raffaele Jervolino (a Christian Democrat), answered two days later that Lombardi's and Giolitti's worries were groundless: research at the ISS was not in danger.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Consequently, the government did nothing.

On 4 December 1963, however, the first centre-left government headed by Aldo Moro was appointed. The new minister of health, Giacomo Mancini (Socialist Party), set up a committee in order to draft a bill aimed at a general restructuring of the institute. The committee was composed of a number of researchers of the institute, a university professor of law and an expert from the Health Ministry. The Nobel Prize-winner and former head of the Therapeutic Chemistry Laboratory of the ISS, Daniel Bovet, was also a member of the committee. In his address to the committee, Mancini argued that although he did not want to suggest any particular decision to the committee's members, the aim of the new institute should have been to promote those scientific research projects which could have been helpful to public-health needs.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ According to the committee, antibiotics production should not have been included among the institute's tasks.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The committee faced the main dilemma of the past life of the institute: whether the ISS should have been devoted to scientific research or to hygiene tasks. The committee proposed to solve the dilemma by rejecting Marotta's autocratic management and by substituting for it a more democratic planning of the scientific activity of the institute.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The proposal involved a general restructuring of the laboratories of the institute and a more democratic management of the institute as a whole.

The bill proposed by the committee would have allowed the institute to overcome its paralysis. It would have given a new mission to the institute after the fall of Marotta's dream of transforming it into an integrated scientific and industrial centre. Unfortunately, the centre-left alliance was not able to gain parliamentary approval. Meanwhile, the failure of the centre-left to make the structural reforms needed to solve the country's imbalances increased social conflicts.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

At the end of the 1960s, protests by left-wing students and young researchers shattered Italian universities and scientific institutions.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The ISS headquarters were occupied by the protesters. The young scientists and the students harshly criticized the ‘American model’ of science, in particular the increasing integration between science and industry and the introduction of a more flexible system of hiring and a wider range of wages. According to Giovanni Berlinguer, at that time a lecturer in occupational medicine at the University of Rome, but also a member of the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party, this model represented neither Italian interests nor workers’ needs. Indeed, it would not have been possible to stop either the brain drain or the import of technology from abroad. The ‘American model’ would give to Italian science an ancillary role to American science, strongly involved in the Vietnam War.

By contrast, left-wing students and researchers proposed a ‘socialist model’ of science based on egalitarianism in both wages and decision-making powers between scientists and workers.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Berlinguer claimed that researchers who had occupied the ISS headquarter proposed such a ‘socialist model’ for the institute. Indeed, Berlinguer stressed that they wanted the institute give up its subordination to private pharmaceutical industries. They also asked that the institute be transformed into an instrument for improving the health conditions of the citizens. The main instrument of this transformation would have been the participation of institute workers as well as that of local and national political authorities.Footnote ¹⁶² However, the attempt at establishing more democratic control over scientific research failed, resulting in fact in the decline of those scientific institutions that were pursuing the ‘American model’.Footnote ¹⁶³ As mentioned above, the judges who condemned Marotta had criticized him for having ruled the ISS as if it had been an American institution.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

The new director of the ISS, Giovanni Battista Marini-Bettolo, tried to solve the problem of patenting inventions, which had been one of the causes of juridical intervention. He failed, however, to convince the government to establish a state agency in charge of exploiting these patents. Meanwhile, political protests by scientists and workers of the institute in 1968 led Marini-Bettolo to resign. According to his secretary, Marini-Bettolo considered that trade union control over the ISS would lead to its paralysis.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

In 1973, the centre-left succeeded in having the parliament approve a reform law of the institute. The new law confirmed the general framework envisaged in the bill drafted by the 1965 committee. A more collegial management of the institute was set up. Scientific directorship was attributed to a committee whose members were the laboratory directors. Administrative control was given to a committee headed by the minister, whose members were three laboratory directors and representatives of institute workers, of local political authorities, and of the Economy Ministry. The study centres were abolished, although they had not been active since 1964. Researchers were no longer allowed to work outside the institute.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Domenico Marotta died on 21 March 1974.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The following year, Daniel Bovet, celebrating his friend, complained of the decadence of Italian scientific research after the demise of the major scientific institutes: the ISS, the CNEN and the LIGB.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The centre-left alliance had not been able to promote either scientific research or the integration between science and industry envisaged in the 1961 meeting.

Concluding remarks

It is worth focusing on the fact that the particular role played by a ‘science maker’Footnote ¹⁶⁹ such as Marotta, as mediator between his technocratic views of scientific researchFootnote ¹⁷⁰ and the aims of the political class, was one of the reasons for the success of the ISS. Indeed, Marotta was successful when he coupled his view with the aims of the political class and therefore enjoyed its protection. However, this fact also revealed the structural weakness of Marotta's model. Marini-Bettolo perceived as a danger the loss of his role as autocratic mediator, even if this loss derived from eventually more democratic control. Yet his fears are indicative of his failure to couple modernization and democracy within scientific institutions, and also in the scientific culture of post-war Italy.

Marotta attempted to somehow oppose this process of transformation of policy-making in the twentieth century. Indeed, endorsing the typical view of the scientist concerning the objectivity of science, Marotta's autocratic directorship aimed to construct a free space for scientists within his institute. However, as pointed out by Majone, because of scientific uncertainty and the necessity to balance several factors, policy-making cannot be an affair of technocrats, but is a microcosm where conflicting world views, social values and professional attitudes play a crucial role.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In science-and-technology studies, most scholars underline that one of the main features of science in democratic countries is flexible negotiation between social actors.Footnote ¹⁷² Marotta constantly and skilfully negotiated with political power to gain autonomy in management. After his retirement, the inability of the centre-left government to achieve the necessary structural reforms led to the decline of the ISS, also because they could not find a proper way to balance autocracy (as embodied by Marotta) and the scientific democracy demanded by the protesters at the end of the 1960s.

It is also worth noting that, under Marotta's directorship, the ISS did not suffer any substantial loss of intellectual resources, unlike other Italian scientific institutions. Most of the members of the via Panisperna school of physics emigrated during Fascism because of racial laws,Footnote ¹⁷³ but according to Giulio Maltese the emigration was also due to the failure to attract the large amounts of money that nuclear physics required.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Many talented young Italian scientists also emigrated in the first years of the post-war period. After the war, future Nobel Prize-winners in medicine and physiology such as Renato Dulbecco and Rita Levi-Montalcini left Italy. Thus we should not underestimate the fact that at a time when scientific emigration was one-way, Marotta managed to invert the flow.