Often when writing grants or giving presentations, a lot of emphasis is made on research being translational, i.e. being able to take the discovery and turn it into medicine or find some other way to make it useful. This is distinguished from basic research, i.e. research for the sake of expanding knowledge. Part of the problem of emphasizing translational research is that research is blind. If you could sit down and predict perfectly the results of every experiment, it's not research, it's blindly following recipes. The most exciting words in scientific research are not "wow" or "eureka" but "huh, that's weird." That's when an experiment doesn't give the expected result. Most of those get filtered out by repeated experiments and troubleshooting, but not all do. Those are the fun results.
One of the classic "huh, that's weird" moments is of course the discovery of penicillin. Alexander Fleming went away on a summer holiday leaving a messy lab bench covered with staphylcoccus petri dishes and came back to find his plates contaminated with mold. Most researchers would just pitch a contaminated plate, but not Fleming. He had discovered lysozyme back in 1922, by investigating what a lot of doctors ignored. Fleming discovered that mucus contains an enzyme that can kill bacteria, which he named lysozyme. Fleming was also primed to believe that microbes secrete substances to kill other microbes. During World War I, Fleming noticed soldiers with deep wounds treated with antiseptics developed sepsis more often than soldiers not treated with antiseptics. Fleming discovered that while antiseptics were great for treating surface wounds, they could not reach the dangerous microbes in deep wounds and killed the helpful microbes near the surface. Fleming those knew that microbes were useful tools when fighting disease. Thus Fleming examined the plates, noticed the ring of dead bacteria surrounding the mold, and thus penicillin was discovered. Of course, Fleming said "that's funny," not "huh, that's weird" but the sentiment is the same. While it could be argued that Fleming wanted to find anti-microbial substances, he was not looking for one when it landed in his lap.
Another of my favorite "huh, that's weird" moments was the discovery of the atomic nucleus. The existence of atoms had been proposed by John Dalton in papers that he published in 1805. Then 7 years after discovering the electron in 1897, J. J. Thomson proposed a model of atomic structured dubbed the "plum pudding model" which proposed a diffuse cloud of positive charge with electrons scattered randomly throughout. As is the nature of science, different scientists started trying to disprove Thomson's theory of atomic structure. One of the laboratories that took up this task was Ernest Rutherford's at the University of Manchester. Under Rutherford's direction, Ernest Marsden and Hans Geiger set up an apparatus to fire alpha particles at a sheet of gold foil. If Thomson was correct, the alpha particles would pass straight through. Instead, some of the alpha particles seemed to ricochet, as if they had hit something. From these results Rutherford proposed a model of a small central core of positive charge with electrons orbiting around.
It is also impossible to know what discoveries will become important. Who would have thought that studying jellyfish bio-luminescence would lead to Green Fluorescent Protein, better known as GFP, an important tool in cellular biology used to tag cells and track gene expression. GFP was discovered in 1962 but wasn't used as a research tool until 1992. In 2008, the researchers responsible for its discovery and development as a research tool received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Taq polymerase is a similar example. No one would have guessed that studying how thermophilic bacteria can survive in high temperatures would lead to the crucial component for DNA polymerase chain reactions (PCR), the common way to amplify a small piece of DNA, used for everything from gene sequencing to detecting a murderer.
Science is not predictable. No one knows what the next great discovery will be or how it will be discovered. All science is important. Even research that earns an Ig Nobel or gets laughed at by Congress may prove vital to all of mankind. Science is important to fund and defend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysozyme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger%E2%80%93Marsden_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_pudding_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#First_evidence-based_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Shimomura
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polymerase_chain_reaction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction
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