American Scientist provides a spirited defense against funding cuts for research into oddball subjects … by listing a lot of strange projects that suddenly led to world-changing breakthroughs:
If someone had said, “Who cares how desert lizard venom works? Let’s not fund that research,” we never would have discovered semaglutide, a key component of drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic, which have helped millions of Americans lose weight. If we had decided not to study how bees optimize nectar foraging and distribution among a colony because it sounds silly, we never would have developed an algorithm that allocates internet traffic among computer servers—a technology that powers the $50 billion web-hosting industry. If we hadn’t funded research into how bizarre microorganisms thrive in boiling Yellowstone geysers, we never would have discovered the bacterium Thermus aquaticus, whose Taq polymerase enzymes now enable medical tests for countless genetic diseases.
…
The Golden Goose Award was devised in response to the Golden Fleece Award, created by former senator William Proxmire in the 1970s to mock what he saw as useless science being funded by taxpayer dollars. He focused on studies with odd or obscure-sounding titles, paying little regard to their actual purpose. Proxmire’s highly publicized campaign seriously damaged the public perception of federally funded scientific research and fostered the myth that researchers often get paid to engage in frivolous work for their own amusement.
What is striking about the numerous Golden Goose examples listed on the AAAS website (along with countless more that were considered) is that nobody knew at the time of funding which of the research projects were going to change the world and improve our lives. Undoubtedly there were many funded projects that didn’t lead to these breakthroughs. That is the nature of problem-solving: Some possible approaches work, some do not. We therefore need to attack problems from many different angles, knowing that some approaches will fail, and some will sound silly when presented out of context.
…
“It’s smart to leverage as much brainpower in our citizenry as we can, because that’s a really efficient way to increase productivity and innovation,” says Brandon Jones, the president of the American Geophysical Union. “One of the best ways you can do that is for science to train as many students across as many broad demographics as possible, because then you increase the future yield in new ideas.”