Podium for the opposition?

This is quite a paradoxical era. Scientific research is in its most productive phase and it continues to produce many beneficial technologies for mankind. For example, we rapidly progress towards a better understanding of many diseases and come up with multiple new approaches to cure them. At the same time, however, the voices against science and technology have never been more shrill. But unsubstantiated concern about new developments is a constant throughout time and, presumably, the more extensive the progress, the more robust the opposition to it.Indeed, the Science & Society section of this journal is dedicated to debating the impact that both parties have on each other, because, as we all know, not everything is sweetness and light between the research community and society at large. But this section was never intended to be a unidirectional flow of information. It is fundamental to biology that every event is the outcome of an equilibrium between forward and back reactions, even if some reactions do not seem to be beneficial at first glance. So we constructed the Science & …