Jailing the seismic seven will cause tremors beyond Italy W hen Bernardo de Bernardinis was asked whether tremors in the Italian city of L'Aquila foreshadowed a major earthquake, his reassuring message to the public was not so much black-and-white as red-or-white. There was no need for evacuation, the civil protection officer assured the press: fretful citizens should go home and sip a glass of wine. His preferred vintage? Absolutely, absolutely a Montepulciano D.O.C. Six days later, in April 2009, L'Aquila was struck by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake that killed 309 people. Mr Bernardinis and the six seismologists who advised him were this week convicted of manslaughter, jailed for six years each and ordered to pay a total €7.8m ($8.7m) in damages. The judge said the defendants" "completely inept, unsuitable and criminally mistaken" assessment of risks had materially contributed to the deaths of 29 victims who chose to stay put. The outcome comforted relatives, who had pressed for criminal charges, but outraged the scientific community, which contends that the six scientists and the official who incorrectly conveyed their assessment have been punished for failing to predict the unpredictable. This judgment highlights the statistically tricky no-man's-land that separates complex, nuanced expert evidence from the blunt policy pronouncements they inform. In areas ranging from public health to civil protection, counter-terrorism to financial regulation, there cannot be many risk analysts who cheered the news. Thomas Jordan, a seismologist at the University of Southern California contacted by the Italian government after the L'Aquila quake, said: "Many scientists are learning to keep their mouths shut." This case encapsulates the uneasy three-way relationship between the people charged with calculating risk, the people charged with spreading that knowledge and the rest of us who want straightforward advice. L'Aquila suffers fairly frequent tremors and a committee of six seismologists was convened to judge the chances that these tremors were the forerunner of a major event. They deemed the probability of a major earthquake small but finite. Richard Walters, an Oxford academic, said this week that he had read their minuted analysis and found it to be "clear, measured and scientifically accurate." These conclusions were then conveyed by Mr Bernardinis, who said there was "no danger." This was technically untrue. What is true is that the chances of a devastating event happening at a given moment were very small. But the fact that something is unlikely does not mean it will not happen: here, the improbable became deadly reality. Among the experts who queued up to condemn the jailings, none could find fault with the defendants" scientific analysis (although a few feel Mr Bernardinis should bear some responsibility for his nonchalant communication). Many point out that the real blame for the L'Aquila death toll rests with those who flouted building regulations; there have been no prosecutions in this regard. Criminalising people for making a difficult call, especially in areas where the probability of a crisis is low but its impact disproportionately high, would soon render public life unworkable. Residents in flood-prone areas would spend much of their lives living off food parcels in sports centres, having been despatched there by the authorities at the first sign of a blackening sky; schools would shut down as the annual influenza season ran its course; global markets would seize up as twitchy economic forecasters voiced premonitions of financial doom. Everyone would see Armageddon coming - even if it wasn't. Nobody would bother testing new technology, such as genetically modified crops, because we would have a perverse and paralysing view of the risks. Offering specialist advice would become an Olympian exercise in back-covering: public pronouncements reduced to an impenetrable, unusable thicket of fudges, caveats and hedges. The seismic seven will appeal, with the vocal support of a global scientific community that regards the convictions as an international embarrassment. Lord May, the UK government's former chief scientific adviser, has compared the judgment to the persecution of Galileo in its ignorance of the scientific process. As one blogger yesterday suggested: "What they need to do is sue the Pope: he has a direct line to God." The writer is a science commentator