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.

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. 

And when you think of systems biology, you really don't think of Philip Morris, the cigarette folks.

It may be time to rethink both.