Munich

It was no joke when Lucio Luzzatto was told on 1 April that he was being sacked as scientific director of Italy's National Cancer Institute in Genoa — even though he was reinstated by the health ministry just six days later.

The institute's temporary commissioner, Maurizio Mauri, sacked Luzzatto after accusing him of breaking the terms of his contract by acting as a consultant for his former employer, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Mauri later accepted that only industrial consultancies were disallowed.

Luzzatto says that he was the victim of a battle over whether a research institute should be run by scientists or administrators. But many of his supporters say he fell foul of the Byzantine politics that permeate Italian science and academia.

Mauri was appointed in 2001 to hold the reins while a new management structure was implemented at the National Cancer Institute, one of Italy's 32 clinical research institutes, whose restructuring has been delayed for more than a decade. During this time, each institute has been in the hands of commissioners who have full administrative control. A law was passed last year to let the institutes run themselves again but this has yet to be implemented.

Mauri charged that Luzzatto broke the terms of his contract by working with the Sloan-Kettering centre, which he left in 2000 to take up his post in Genoa. Luzzatto argues that such collaborations are both normal and desirable in academic research, and points out that he spent a total of only 16 days in New York last year. Scientists throughout Italy wrote to the health ministry in his defence, attesting to his dedication to the Genoa institute.

At a meeting on 6 April, the ministry accepted Luzzatto's arguments and Mauri retracted his letter of dismissal. But Luzzatto says he remains under strong pressure to leave the institute voluntarily. In an attempt to defuse the tensions, the local government of Liguria has offered to finance an independent laboratory for him.

Luzzatto suspects that the real reasons for the dismissal were his disagreements with Mauri about how the institute should be run. One such dispute concerned Mauri's decision to claw back salary supplements from PhD scientists that are legally applicable only to those with MDs. Luzzatto had argued that it would be demoralizing to have different pay for the same work within a lab.

“Italy says it wants to reverse the brain drain — it is appalling that a top scientist who returns to Italy should be treated in this way,” comments Giovanni Romeo, a medical geneticist at the University of Bologna.