Professor Bucci, you are a leading figure in the Italian and international landscape, known for your work in research integrity, as well as for your tireless outreach, and finally, for your scientific production. How do you reconcile these two souls – the rigorous one of research and the more popularizing and critical one of information?
In fact, I don’t believe there’s much conflict: I’ve always considered it a duty for someone like me, who was trained and professionally grew thanks to public universities and public funding, to give back at least in part what I’ve received to society.
One of the topics you often address is scientific disinformation. In your opinion, what are the main causes of this phenomenon and how can we defend ourselves from it?
Scientific disinformation is a complex phenomenon that doesn’t simply arise from ignorance or lack of education, but is rooted more deeply in human cognitive limitations, economic and political interests, distrust in institutions, and digital communication dynamics.
Human beings naturally tend to seek confirmation of their own beliefs, to prefer simple explanations, and to reject information that challenges their identity or values. This attitude, while understandable, becomes dangerous when applied to issues that require specific expertise, such as vaccines, climate change, or genetics.
Added to all this is the growing manipulation of science by actors who use it to justify ideological choices or market interests, by selecting data, distorting results, or amplifying apparent controversies. Finally, social networks amplify the problem by making viral what excites or polarizes, not what is true.
Defending against disinformation means investing in scientific education from schools, strengthening the autonomy and integrity of scientific communication, supporting competent and responsible journalism, but also developing tools in citizens to evaluate sources, recognize conflicts of interest, and distinguish between opinion and knowledge.
Science isn’t infallible, but it remains the most reliable method we have to understand the world: only by learning how it works can we also learn not to be deceived by those who misuse it or fight it for convenience.
Information travels at incredible speed. What is the role of scientific dissemination, and more generally, of quality information, in society?
In a society where information spreads with unprecedented speed, scientific dissemination and quality information play a crucial role not only in transmitting knowledge but in creating the very conditions for an informed citizenry.
It’s not just about “explaining science well,” but about counteracting the confusion between opinion and evidence, sensationalism and method, subjective experiences and verifiable data. Good dissemination doesn’t simplify reality to the point of making it unrecognizable, but helps to make it readable without distorting it.
It makes visible the processes by which scientific knowledge is built – doubts, experiments, refutations, revisions – giving the public not so much a list of truths to learn, but a map for navigating critical thinking.
In this sense, informing well is also a political act, because it gives citizens back the ability to understand public choices, to evaluate their consistency with evidence, and to exercise democratic control.
When reliable information is lacking, or when it’s drowned out by the noise of disinformation, the consequence isn’t just individual error: it’s the short-circuiting of democracies.
A misinformed society is easily manipulated, because it mistakes the loudest voice for the most competent one, and methodical doubt for an ideological attack.
For this reason, quality scientific dissemination and information are not a luxury for quiet times, but a necessary condition for the very functioning of a free, rational society capable of deciding its own future.
Professor Bucci, one topic that often generates debate is homeopathic medicine. From a scientific point of view, what is your position regarding the effectiveness of these practices?
From a scientific point of view, the effectiveness of homeopathic medicine finds no reliable confirmation. Its theoretical bases – such as extreme dilution of substances and the supposed “water memory” – are incompatible with everything we know about chemistry, physics, and biology.
Numerous controlled clinical studies have shown that homeopathic remedies have no effects superior to placebo, and the most rigorous meta-analyses systematically confirm this.
This doesn’t mean that someone taking a homeopathic remedy can’t feel better: the point is that this improvement depends on psychological factors, the attention received, the spontaneous course of the illness, not on an active ingredient actually present and functional.
Therefore, continuing to talk about homeopathic “medicines” is misleading. In an era where evidence-based medicine demands maximum rigor, tolerating practices that don’t even meet minimal criteria of efficacy means making an unjustified and dangerous exception.
Even more concerning is that these products are sold in pharmacies, with implicit or explicit therapeutic indications, and even made tax-deductible, as if they were real cures. Medical science has limits and uncertainties, but it’s based on a method of continuous verification and falsification: homeopathy, on the contrary, remains impervious to contrary evidence.
And if it cannot be proven to work, the ethical and civil responsibility is to state it clearly. Continuing to tolerate the equivocation, for economic convenience or to please the convictions of some, means betraying the pact of trust between science, medicine, and society.
Despite scientific evidence, homeopathy continues to be practiced and enjoys a certain popularity. You raised the issue of the unconstitutionality of funds for homeopathic medicine. How do you explain this discrepancy between scientific rigor and public perception regarding the validity of homeopathy?
Yes, I raised the issue because I believe that public funding and even the tax deductibility of homeopathic products pose a serious constitutional problem: the Italian State, by its very Constitution, has the obligation to protect health as a fundamental right of the individual, based on scientific evidence.
This constraint is non-negotiable, not even by Parliament. Therefore, on the one hand, you cannot demand rigor in the evaluation of medicines, demand that official medicine be based on solid evidence, and on the other hand, fund products that, by definition, do not pass any of the minimum criteria of efficacy. It is an unacceptable contradiction that undermines the coherence of the entire healthcare system.
As for the popularity of homeopathy, the explanation lies in a combination of factors. First, there’s a widespread cultural deficiency: many people lack adequate tools to distinguish between a proven cure and a well-packaged placebo. Homeopathy presents itself with medical language, in pharmacies, with packaging that looks like that of real medicines, and this leads to error.
Furthermore, the homeopathic narrative responds to deep needs: it reassures, is perceived as “natural,” offers simple solutions, and above all, provides listening, in a context where official medicine, pressed by time and costs, often can no longer do so.
But none of this justifies compromising with irrationality. If a person freely chooses to rely on homeopathy, they can do so – but they must know exactly what they are taking: a product without an active ingredient, without demonstrated effects, and without the right to be reimbursed by the community.
In short, public perception is the result of misinformation, cultural suggestion, and – let’s not forget – specific marketing strategies. The task of science and institutions is not to indulge what “pleases” or “works” psychologically, but to ensure that what is proposed as a cure is genuinely effective.
Only in this way can public health be protected and trust in medicine preserved. Tolerance towards homeopathy, today, is not openness: it is a cultural surrender.
What risks can arise from relying exclusively on therapies like homeopathy, especially in the presence of serious pathologies?
Relying exclusively on homeopathic therapies in the presence of serious pathologies is extremely dangerous, because it means giving up effective treatments, delaying correct diagnoses, and allowing a disease to progress unchecked.
Cases of patients who, believing they were treating themselves with homeopathic remedies, avoided life-saving treatments are unfortunately documented and tragically eloquent.
But the risk is not limited to exclusive reliance: it also exists, and perhaps more subtly, when homeopathy is integrated alongside evidence-based medicine, because it introduces cognitive toxins into the patient’s decision-making process.
What do we mean by “cognitive toxins”?
We mean those distorted beliefs that, once introduced, progressively undermine the ability to correctly evaluate medical information. If I accept that a granule without an active ingredient can have therapeutic effects, I am already adopting an alternative criterion to that of experimental proof. If I believe that “it works because it worked for me,” I am putting anecdote in place of evidence.
These toxins do not remain confined: they affect how the patient perceives even conventional treatments, fuel distrust towards doctors, and open the door to increasingly radical pseudotherapies. Once the well of rational judgment is poisoned, scientific medicine itself becomes suspect, and the patient may begin to make increasingly less informed decisions, even on fundamental therapies.
Homeopathy, precisely because it lacks specific effects, presents itself as harmless. But its danger lies not in the active ingredient that isn’t there, but in the idea it conveys: that science is an opinion, that all cures are equivalent, that reality can be bent to subjective experience.
For this reason, tolerating it, even as a “complement,” is not neutral. It is a step towards scientific miseducation, in a field – that of health – where adherence to reality can make the difference between life and death.
As a professor at Temple University, you have an international perspective on research and teaching. Are there significant differences between the Italian and American academic worlds that you would like to highlight?
The answer I would have given a year ago would have been very different from the one I feel able to give today. At one time, I would have highlighted the structural differences, the greater resources of the American system, the merit-based competition, the bureaucratic streamlining, academic freedom understood as real autonomy of research and teaching.
I would also have acknowledged the limitations of the Italian system: fragmentation, chronic precariousness, blocked careers, the tendency to discourage talent instead of cultivating it. But today, unfortunately, the picture has radically changed, at least concerning the United States.
In recent months, we have been witnessing an unprecedented attack on academic freedom precisely in that country which for decades has been the symbol of intellectual openness and the centrality of science.
Entire sectors of research are being pressured by political groups seeking to dictate what can be taught, what studies can be funded, what words can be used.
History, biology, medicine itself are being rewritten to appease ideological narratives, and professors who oppose risk their jobs or public condemnation. Biomedical research has become a target of inquiries, censorship, and smear campaigns. Teaching is under threat, not for scientific reasons, but for identity and political issues.
In this context, paradoxically, Europe – and even Italy, despite its chronic problems – appears today as a more stable refuge for the freedom of scientific thought. Not because everything is resolved, but because at least that form of systematic hostility that is undermining the very foundations of knowledge in some American states has not yet exploded here.
We cannot afford to lower our guard: what is happening in the USA is a warning. Academic freedom is not a given: it is a fragile balance that must be defended every day with clarity, rigor, and courage.