The Case for Curiosity-Driven Research

1Whenever public money is limited, research whose purpose is simply to understand nature comes under pressure. Why, critics ask, should taxpayers support studies of distant stars, abstract mathematics, or tiny organisms when there are hospitals to be built and jobs to be created? The demand that research promise a clear benefit sounds sensible, and it is not easy to dismiss.

2The difficulty is that the usefulness of knowledge is very hard to predict. Many technologies that we now take for granted grew out of work that its own pioneers regarded as having no practical application. Those researchers were driven by curiosity about a puzzle, not by a plan for a product. The pioneers of many fields could not have explained, at the time, what their work was for, and they often had to defend it against skeptical colleagues. Years or even decades later, other people recognized that the puzzle's answer could be applied to a problem they cared about. If funding had been limited to projects with obvious goals, those answers might never have been found.

3This does not mean that basic research is simply a lottery. Its value lies partly in the fact that it builds a common stock of ideas and trained people. A society that has many people who can think rigorously about unfamiliar problems is better prepared for crises that no one has foreseen. In this sense, basic research resembles insurance: we cannot say which investment will pay off, but the collection as a whole increases our ability to respond to the unexpected. Moreover, the habits of mind that basic research encourages, such as patience with failure and respect for evidence, are valuable far beyond the laboratory.

4Critics are right to insist on accountability, however. Some projects are poorly conceived, and there is always a risk that researchers will use the language of curiosity to defend work that has little merit. The answer is not to abandon basic research but to evaluate it carefully, through review by independent experts who judge the quality of the questions and the methods, rather than by the promise of quick returns.

5Ultimately, the choice is not between practical and impractical science. Applied research solves the problems we already know about, while basic research widens the range of problems we can even imagine solving. Treating them as competitors for the same limited funds risks starving the source from which future applications will flow. A sensible policy supports both, and it accepts that some uncertainty is the price of progress.