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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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Human exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) has recently been linked to negative health claims, like a decline in reproductive function in adults and stunted neurodevelopment in children, and so people consumed with the 'natural' fallacy have been up in arms about it.  It hasn't quite become 'BPA causes autism' hysteria, like they did with vaccines, but it is getting close. 

Naturally, companies have listened to the nocebo worries of the natural-obsessed and dutifully created BPA-free products and charged more money for them.

Do you think pharmaceutical companies are creating problems that don't exist in order to keep selling drugs to an increasingly over-medicated population? Do you think scientists are unethical if they work at a corporation like DuPont or in nuclear science, rather than being funded by the government?

Such beliefs have become so increasingly mainstream among a particular political and cultural demographic that we can quite easily make lots of accurate determinations about them, the same way we can infer things about someone if they don't buy into global warming.

A cookbook editor in the New York Times says I am wrong on the gluten-free fad and that, if it makes people feel better to buy gluten-free, to leave them alone. 

Well, well, well, look at the New York Times embracing libertarianism and food choice when it comes to fads their demographic happens to embrace. Like with sugar and GMOs, they want science and reason to stay out of it, because those are weird fetishes of a large chunk of their readership, while we are constantly told how stupid people are if they don't accept global warming. Right?

David Perlmutter, MD, became well-known last year as the best-selling author of Grain Brain, which demonizes wheat (and, of course, gluten) and he recently claimed that simple dietary changes would prevent half of Alzheimer's cases

ESA, the European Space Agency, is my favorite space organization.

Yeah, I said it. The guy whose favorite movie is "The Right Stuff" and who could write a whole book on the Mercury program prefers the ESA over NASA. The reason is because ESA cares about outreach in a way that NASA doesn't. ESA does not care if you are the BBC or Science 2.0, if you call someone, they call back. If it involves more than a press release claiming it has 'implications for life on other planets' you are going to be stuck in a maze of bureuacracy.
For THE WIRED WORLD IN 2013 annual prognostication issue, predictions for the year by some of the luminaries in science media, I predicted that one of the Big 5 organs would be created.

The benefit is obvious; organs created from a patient's own adult stem cells mean no chance of rejection and no need for expensive immunosuppressive drugs. Science-fiction/ethical scenarios like raising animals or people for 'harvesting' by wealthy elites are off the table because a customized organ could be grown in the lab.