Do you remember the activists who threw tomato puree on art masterpieces? Of course we do. News reports, collective outrage, and calls for exemplary punishment followed. To stop such actions in Italy, Law Number 6 of January 22, 2024, was passed, introducing “Sanctioning provisions on the destruction, dispersion, deterioration, defacement, and illegal use of cultural or landscape heritage.” Now for another question: Do you remember the activists who tore down protective nets, uprooted plants born from Italian research, and sabotaged experiments designed to make agriculture more sustainable? Probably not — because they acted at night with their faces covered. And because both the media and politicians had little to say when these incidents happened — in June 2024 against the University of Milan and in February 2025 against the University of Verona.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the real eco-vandals are the latter more than the former. On the one hand, we have a symbolic action — perhaps unsettling but not causing permanent damage — meant to draw attention to a real problem: climate change. On the other, we have an act of destructive aggression targeting not only harmless seedlings (Milan rice and Verona Chardonnay, both edited for fungal resistance) but also a public good and a national economic resource. They may think they are protecting the environment, but they are harming it because the uprooted plants were intended to reduce the use of fungicides. Moreover, they contained no foreign DNA, and the tiny change to their genome was entirely similar to a natural mutation.

Why shouldn’t the anti-vandals law apply to these anti-biotech saboteurs as well? Is scientific research not part of our cultural heritage? Are they not seeking to destroy it? The goal of these actions is to intimidate researchers, prevent other projects approved by the Ministry of the Environment from reaching the field, and block a key step in research — testing plant performance under controlled but realistic conditions. Ultimately, they aim to close the window opened in Italy by the alliance between scientists and major farmers’ confederations.

The resumption of experimentation after a 20-year halt had been made possible by a cross-party amendment in Parliament. The inauguration of the experimental rice field was attended by life scientist and senator Elena Cattaneo, while the launch of the small experimental vineyard received the blessing of Agriculture Minister Lollobrigida. Can we really allow a handful of vandals armed with ignorance and shears to go unchecked?