Science and Math Don’t Have to Be Practical to Be Worthwhile
For instance, Green said, for many years, there was little funding available for research on “biofilms,” which is basically bacterial slime. (“It’s the plaque on your teeth, the gunk in a pipe, the rind on your cheese,” she explained.) “There was no apparent translational application, so it went underfunded and understudied for years,” Green said. It turned out, however, that understanding the development of biofilms was enormously important in understanding the microbial roots of infectious disease. “We’re now playing catch-up,” Green said. “There are certain basic aspects of biology that you have to understand in order to treat infections.”
The lesson seems pretty clear: If you guide the flow of money based on current needs, you’ll miss deeper truths that you’ll later find yourself wishing you had understood.