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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Do you want to ban cigarettes and legalize marijuana?  Did you cheer when a judge in one state broke the law regarding the Ten Commandments and hissed when a judge in another state broke the law regarding gay marriage?

Freedom is a moving target, as is social authoritarianism, and how people seem to come down on one issue often shows how they think on a whole raft of other ones. 
Sometimes natural is not good.   Actually, a lot of the time natural is bad but we live in in era where anti-science types have a 'natural' fetish, believing anything natural is good.

But not always. Weeds are natural yet if you leave them alone your vegetables will die.  And that goes for plenty of other invasive species.  Even wild salmon.

There's long been precautionary principle hysteria that farm-raised salmon - created so we could all benefit from the health effects of eating fish without risking overfishing - would cause disease among the wild population.  Who knew that they were so delicate after millions of years of evolution?  
Biology is tricky and evolutionary biology even trickier - in the modern age, with insights into epigenetics, that trickiness and general complexity means virtually any stance you want to adopt on any issue can claim to be 'biological' if you just say something pithy like 'It's a combination of nature and nurture', which is the biology equivalent of amateur political scientists who say 'If only people would talk to each other we could all get along' about foreign relations.
At my kid's graduation party on Sunday I had a chance to meet Tom Goddard who, it turns out, works on a tool used to look at the spatial organization of chromosomes in the cell nucleus and protein structures determined by electron cryo-microscopy.

The tool is called Chimera (a fun name by any measure) and it is developed/maintained by the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics (RBVI) group at UC San Francisco.
"Chagas Disease: “The New HIV/AIDS of the Americas”" screams the headline of an editorial in the open access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, written primarily by two principal investigators of a vaccine against Chagas disease - and it has resounded with a thud among the actual people they think they are helping.
Space is an extremely hostile environment. You knew that, though no one wants to think about exploding instantly as their blood boils without an atmosphere (or it does not - like how airplanes fly, this seems to still be a debate). Most planets aren't all that much better.