That is where the presentation begins. With a phrase often heard in rooms like this one, attributed to Benjamin Franklin: better that a hundred guilty escape punishment than that one innocent suffer. Since 1986, DNA serves this purpose too. Not to condemn the one who has nothing to do with it.
Roberto Sgalla, director of the Center, opens. Laura Berti, RAI anchor, moderates. The speakers are Senator Beatrice Lorenzin, former Minister of Health; Senator Daniela Sbrollini, vice-chair of the Senate Health Commission; and Giovanni Simonetti, professor emeritus at Tor Vergata. Enrico Orzes is present.
The book says one simple thing. DNA does not speak on its own. Four letters, more than twenty thousand genes, inside the instructions that make us. But the instructions have to be read. They have to be understood. Without a doctor looking at the patient, without family history, without the environment in which one lives, the genetic datum stays silent. Or worse, it lies.
Novelli comes from Rossano Calabro. He studied in Urbino with Giorgio Fornaini, then in Rome with Bruno Dallapiccola. He isolated the gene for Laron syndrome. He lived through the era he calls the gene hunters' era, when finding a sequence took years and required following entire families. In the room he speaks of his brother, a pediatric geneticist, and of the praying mantises he watched as a boy in the garden. Science begins with curiosity, before the laboratories.

Simonetti brings the cases. Giovanni, the boy who dreamed of flying acrobatic planes and had favism: the dream cut short by a genetic variant, by a test that on its own could not tell the whole story. The woman with the same predisposition to breast cancer as her sister, who had her breast removed and then discovered the real problem was perhaps the ovaries. The cure for thalassemia today, possible by modifying DNA — something that thirty years ago, when one slept beside thalassemic patients in the wards, was science fiction. Medicine changes because knowledge changes, not because the patients change.
One word keeps coming back. Exposome. It is everything the body encounters in a lifetime. The air, food, work, habits, time. The changing climate. Loneliness. Pollutants. The organization of work, insurance, the health system. It counts as much as the genome. Perhaps more. Lorenzin says it plainly: the mechanistic approach is no longer enough, the person sits inside an environment that shapes them.

Lorenzin recalls 2013, the European semester, the microbiome network built also thanks to Novelli's contacts, the databanks. Then she asks the hard questions. Why Italy does not invest enough, even though the infrastructure and institutes like the IRCCS are there. Why researchers are lost, not only for money but for a career path that does not open. Why books are missing, instruments are missing, and within a demographic winter draining the country it becomes hard to be attractive to those coming from outside. The politician, she says, must surround themselves with the best. Of any color. Must bring home the result, not the slogan.
Simonetti presses harder. Research money is given out poorly. No one checks the results five years on. In Sassari, he cites a figure that lingers in the room: out of one hundred and twenty thousand citizens, thousands work for the local health authorities. The disproportion tells the story of a system more than of a city.
Novelli returns to Covid. The genome, he says, made the difference. Individual sensitivity to the virus was not a detail: it was the heart of the matter. Who got seriously ill, who did not, who responded to the drug, who did not. The tools to read these differences existed already. They still exist. For the next viruses they need to work earlier, not later. Adequate funding is needed, and a culture that does not run from the word vaccine. He recalls London, the meningitis B outbreak, the lack of information given to young people and their parents. He cites a figure about the human reference DNA that gives one pause: seventy percent belongs to a single anonymous person, identified by the code RP11. We still work on a partial map. And we work on few populations.

Then there is forensic genomics, where the evening had begun. There is the genomics of history — Neanderthals, migrations, ancient admixtures, diseases that vanished and diseases that returned. There is the genomics of the future — engineered bacteria, biological wars to be avoided, contaminations to be prevented. There is galactosemia, galactokinase, examples of metabolic diseases where reading a gene well changes a child's life. There is the woman whom a misread test cost an organ that perhaps was not the target.
Orzes, the author's voice in the room, brings it all back to the reader. Do-it-yourself genetics produces what he calls a genoscope, a horoscope of DNA. You buy it online, it arrives at home, it says things. It is no use. What is needed is counseling. A doctor, a geneticist, someone who knows how to read. Otherwise the datum becomes anxiety, or worse, a wrong decision.
One thing the book does not hide. Genomics today is not for everyone. It costs, it is not available everywhere, it is not yet inside public health care as it should be. Making it accessible is a political choice, not only a scientific one. Lorenzin and Sbrollini say it from the senators' bench: personalized medicine will either be for all or it will be a privilege. There is no third way.

The book is not a manual. It is not an autobiography. It is an invitation. To look at genetics for what it really is: a human adventure, made of possibilities, risks, opportunities. A map to be read by at least two. The patient and the one who cares for them. The citizen and the one who informs them. The datum and the one who knows how to interpret it.
That afternoon in 1986, in Leicester, DNA saved an innocent man before condemning a guilty one. Forty years on, the lesson holds. We read to understand. We read so as not to be wrong. We read together. We read because the one who writes knows that behind every gene there is a person.

 *Board Member, SRSN (Roman Society of Natural Science) Past Editor-in-Chief, Italian Journal of Dermosurgery