On the national level, "Polar Connections" is the theme of this year's National Science and Technology Week—April 26 to May 2—a major public-outreach program produced by the National Science Foundation and supported by corporate and associated sponsors. In a message last fall to educators and parents engaged in outreach activities, NSF director Neal Lane wrote that "the North and South Poles are natural laboratories and unique in the matchless opportunities they offer scientists and engineers to conduct research in pristine, natural environments."
The notion of natural laboratories as a place to conduct scientific research is an attractive one, particularly to those doomed to spend the greater part of their lives working inside concrete walls lit by flickering banks of fluorescent lights. But the concept of natural laboratories, or geographically defined research, probably is at odds with what many life scientists consider to be modern approaches to biology. The terms themselves ...
