Sir

In his Correspondence (Nature 415, 472; 2002), a response to your Opinion article (Nature 414, 829; 2001), L. Maiani states that, in comparing CERN with DESY, “you fail to take into account the significant cost-of-living differentials between Geneva and most other European locations”. Most CERN employees do not suffer from the high cost of living in Switzerland because they live and do most of their business a few kilometres away in France. They get the best of both worlds: high salary with excellent benefits, and a relatively low cost of living. In this sense, if no other, they are 'more equal than others'.

For decades, particle physics in Italy has been very well funded. It has been able to attract excellent students and researchers with the prospect of an exciting career, opportunities for travel, and salaries even while studying for their laurea projects (equivalent to a master's degree), in stark contrast with those in other disciplines. This dominance of particle physics is probably due to the legacy of Enrico Fermi, who started the school that became Italy's national institute of nuclear physics, of which Maiani was president before becoming director general of CERN.

Thanks to this institute, which receives some 250 million euro (US$216 million) a year from the Italian government, and to the roughly 100 million euro a year that Italy contributes to CERN, Italian particle physics has been receiving more research money — by orders of magnitude — than any other Italian basic scientific discipline. (The Italian research budget is a meagre 1% of its GDP.) This perhaps helps to explain why Italian research has higher standards in particle physics than in other scientific disciplines.