sauron wrote on Jan 25, 2013, 10:27:
Good article on Neil Degrasse Tyson's speech. A lot of it is true - government can fund basic science like nobody else. Other organizations always have a specific goal - curing a disease or making money.

Interestingly, the NIH has deliberately shifted towards translational research over the last 5 years. That means research focused on addressing human disease. For people like me, that's fine since I work on diseases of the brain and spinal cord. But if I was working on fly or worm development or something basic, I'd be in trouble.

You may not think that fly and worm development are very important, but most of the genes we know about today that are linked to human disease originally came from exactly those studies. It just takes a while for the studies to go from flies, to mice, to humans.