Luca Coscioni is a unique candidate in next month's Italian general election. For a start, the major weapons in the 33year-old's campaign armoury are a wheelchair and the computer with which he speaks through a synthetic voice.
Six years ago, Mr Coscioni was a busy economics lecturer at the University of Viterbo whose biggest after-hours passion was marathon running. Feeling a strange stiffness in his legs after a training run, he consulted his doctor. The diagnosis, handed to him in a sealed envelope, was dramatic and devastating - amiotrophic lateral sclerosis, the same disease as that from which the well-known British physicist Stephen Hawking suffers.
Mr Coscioni is now confined to a wheelchair and able to move only one finger, which he uses to tap out his synthetic voice on his computer, thanks to a combination of voice and cursor programmes. He himself can speak only with great difficulty and when he does so, only his wife, Maria Antonietta, and his mother can understand him.
Fielded by the always provocative, often socially innovative Radical Party, Mr Coscioni is fighting a political battle - literally for his life. He wants to win a parliamentary seat in order to lobby for the legalisation of research on "stem cells", a key ingredient in "therapeutic cloning" and a possible way forward in the fight against a number of killer diseases, including his own.
"Ten million Italians could be treated with therapies based on stem cells - people suffering from a range of diseases including, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, amiotrophic lateral sclerosis, spinal muscular atrophy, traumatic damage to the spinal marrow, muscular dystrophy, leukemia, diabetes, heart attacks and strokes," Mr Coscioni wrote in a letter with which he presented his candidacy earlier this year.
Inevitably, there are those who argue that he is merely being used by the Radical Party, which has chosen him as the No 1 "proportional" candidate in the districts of Lazio, Emilia Romagna and Umbria, as well as the first-past-the-post candidate in the constituency of Orvieto.
To them, Luca Coscioni replies that he, "the silent me", has given a voice to the more than 400 scientific researchers worldwide, among them 42 Nobel laureates, who have endorsed his call for what he describes as "freedom of science and conscience . . . the affirmation of fundamental liberties - freedom of thought, personal freedom, religious freedom . . ."
The last-mentioned "freedom", of course, brings us to the nub of the socio-political argument basic to Mr Coscioni's candidacy. Namely, the fact that the Catholic Church is strongly opposed to therapeutic cloning since the stem cells are culled from "surplus" human embryos left over from assisted fertility procedures. The Catholic Church teaches that such embryos can only be regarded as human beings.
"The Vatican is free to think it ethical to throw away the socalled surplus embryos rather than that they be used for research that could - and I underline could - give hope to millions of people. It is, however, the duty of political forces, even Catholic forces, to reject this moral blackmail," Mr Coscioni said during a recent appearance on the current affairs TV programme Il Raggio Verde.
While stem cell research is legally regulated in both Britain and the US, it remains illegal in Italy. Last September, the European Parliament also rejected a resolution backing therapeutic cloning.
In fielding Mr Coscioni, the Radical Party has added a new element to its well-established tradition of innovative politics. In the 1970s, its "historic" leaders, the former EU Commissioner Ms Emma Bonino and Marco Pannella, successfully led the battle for both divorce and abortion.
In more recent times, the party has focused on anti-prohibitionism on soft drugs while, for this election, it has defiantly opted to go it alone. That choice has been an expensive one as the Radicals have found themselves consistently squeezed out of media coverage of the electoral debate by the centre-left and centre-right coalitions.
Opinion polls predict only a 3-4 per cent vote for them next month. An electoral win for Mr Coscioni, however, might lend a deal of political, and perhaps even moral, credibility to the Radicals' cause.