There’s certainly money in politics, and Facebook knows it. The company, now under pressure to to justify its enormous $104 billion IPO, is trying to hire someone to maximize political advertising sales during the 2012 election season in the U.S.

“The Client Partner will establish and strengthen key relationships with national political campaigns and organizations with a focus on driving revenue, platform adoption, advertiser education, and advertiser satisfaction,” the posting on Facebook's website says.

How much money is in politics for Facebook? That's hard to say. But with the rise of the Super PAC, campaign spending on advertising will likely reach record-breaking levels this year. A growing percentage of that is moving online, in part because fewer people are watching live TV than during previous election years, according to the global ad agency WPP. The Hill reports that the Obama campaign alone is on track to spend $35 million on total online advertising this year, up from $16 million in 2008.

Unlike other advertisers that have questioned the value of Facebook this week, both the Romney and Obama presidential campaigns are likely to appreciate Facebook's importance. It had 40 million U.S. users in 2008 compared with 160 million today—almost the entire American voting public, according to The Guardian. 

So, yes, we’ll be seeing a lot more politics in and next to our News Feeds over the next few months, targeted based on our activity and our friends' activity on the network. Whether the lifting of corporate spending limits on political campaigns, a result of a Supreme Court decision in 2010, will actually be a meaningful boost Facebook’s bottom line this year is unknown. The company’s total advertising revenue worldwide was about $3 billion in 2011.

GenomeWeb Daily News reports that DNA sequencing is able to track cancerous blood cells in leukemia patients even when currently used methods cannot. The findings, published on May 16 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, suggest that high-throughput sequencing could improve the diagnosis and post-treatment monitoring of leukemia. The sequencing-based method is more sensitive than one of the two typical methods of detecting the malignant cells (flow cytometry) and cheaper and faster than the other (quantitative real-time PCR).

GenomeWeb notes that the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, one of the research institutions involved in the study, has applied for patents related to the technique.

Facebook yesterday amended its IPO documents to underscore to investors the business risks of its rapidly rising use on mobile devices, where it brings in no meaningful advertising dollars.

But the company may face even more fundamental questions about advertising from its existing customers.

I talked with William Pearce, a business school lecturer at University of California, Berkeley. He’s worked for some major brands: he was Chief Marketing Officer of Del Monte until 2011, and previously held the same role at Taco Bell as well top positions at Campbells Soup and Proctor & Gamble.

Marketers, Pearce said, are still in the early stages of evaluating the value of the Facebook fan page. That's one main way major consumer companies engage with segments of the social network’s users. Often they'll buy paid advertising or sponsored stories on Facebook to promote that page.

So what’s the value of a Facebook brand page with a million fans? How does that translate to sales? 

Facebook’s main customers—that is, the marketers buying ads—don’t yet know. There's not yet a lot of data, and some, Pearce said, are frustrated that the company isn’t doing enough to help them figure it out. 

“Facebook likes to say to advertisers: you’re thinking about us all wrong. Don’t think of us as a traditional advertising platform. Think of us a way to open a dialogue with your customers," he said. "That may be true. But if that is in fact the case, they’re going to have to price their product in a way that makes sense to marketers." 

There’s also still a lot of room for Facebook to grow. Advertising made up 85 percent of Facebook's total revenue last year, or $3.2 billion dollars, but the biggest global brands spend up as much as a $1 billion each on their marketing budgets. 

The company could be valued at up to $96 billion dollars when it hits the market on May 18th. It is expected to be the largest-ever IPO from an Internet company.