I just wrote an article talking about how limiting choice is framed as 'leading the way' when it comes to a pet belief - and anti-science Californians who insist any genetically optimized food is dangerous are making my point while making some inroads into turning their non-reality-based beliefs into law for everyone in the state.

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.