Gianfranco Pancino moves through three lives which, in his account, become a single trajectory: political militancy during the years of workers’ struggles and Autonomia, exile — experienced as a painful fracture but also as an opening toward other cultures and perspectives — and finally scientific research, leading to his involvement in HIV/AIDS studies and global health issues. A path marked by a constant demand for justice and a stubborn love for knowledge, which also returns in his reflections on the non-neutrality of science, on the limits of “democratic medicine” revealed during the pandemic, and on the need to root new practices of conflict and care in the territory, such as popular clinics