D
deleted87051
Interesting interview
Whenever I hear someone cry about all the money wasted by our government and organizations like the NSF and NIH I like to point out the countless discoveries that have been made by basic science. The ones that bother me are the particularly hardcore libertarians who don’t realize that the market isn’t going to fund what it doesn’t see an immediate profit in. For instance, if basic scientists hadn’t been studying primitive plant immunology we would never have CRISPR. If we hadn’t discovered bacteria living in heat vents on the ocean floor we never would have found TAQ polymerase; thereby allowing large scale genetic research.