a Mr Borst snip..
Because research doesn’t have “practical value” doesn’t mean it’s worthless. In science, all research has value, even — or especially — failures. If somebody finds something out that doesn’t work, then others don’t have to make that mistake. When somebody advances our knowledge even a jot, that information may have a pay-off years down the road, if ever. But we cannot research only the things that have “potential value.” That’s what Big Pharma does and see where it leads.

my comments and I hope no one minds stories...
as my father in law informed me the first thing a statistic tell you is what you know about a population and the second thing it inform you of is what you do not know about a population.  for science folks the second revelation may well be more important than the first.

also reflecting on other conversation with my father in law (you can see a picture of him on my facebook page) who worked in the labs of such notables as Oppenheimer, Block and Hansen and witness the first nmr event and then went on be the driving force behind building the first operational size nmr... for many of the ideas generated at the front side of the building of what we now know as the Silicon Valley the practical use of these were totally unknown to these early pioneers.  I can recall him telling about what he described as 12 really smart people (one of who I suspect was David Packard of HP fame) setting around the table and looking at the proto type mechanism for what is now used for bar code scanner (it should be pointed out that neither mass storage devices nor bar code were available at this time) and no one in the room could think of a single idea for which the device could be used.  As far as I can tell from conversations with my father in law there was no automatic going from concept, to experiment and then on to a pre thought out end product.  It was much more hit and miss.

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