From a reader:

Excellent point about science. Matt Ridley gets asked about his view
on attitudes toward science in Europe vs the US (with the questioner
always wondering what’s wrong with the US), and he points out that,
with regards to genetic modification, the average European asks “how
do we keep people from doing X?” whereas Americans ask “when will I be
able to do X?”
(I googled and found this in an article of his too:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/opinion/story/0,12981,928170,00.html)
You identified the phenomenon on the left, by the way, and it’s the
same on the right in that it’s faith-based:
“But the left stands in the way (while liberals let them) of all of this out of some mumbo-jumbo fear of technology or because they have special phobias about the direction of capitalism or because….I dunno why.” It’s a sort of faith that drives that (what is natural is good). And
the embryonic stem cell research restrictions are anti-science,
because they work backward from a strange hard-stop: we can’t kill
embyos because that’s “life” and God says you can’t take human life.
Those doing the scientific inquiry are happy to engage in earnest
ethical debate over when life begins, but invoking a deity and all
that implies (“faith” is invoked, and inquiry stops) is just simply a
bad argument being taken seriously in the political realm.