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Basic research is where scientists are free to pursue their curiosity and interrogate Nature, not with any short-term practical end in view but to seek knowledge for its own sake. Maxwell wasn’t thinking of radio, radar or television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnetism; Newton wasn’t dreaming of space flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon; Roentgen wasn’t contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it X-rays; Curie wasn’t thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of the mineral pitchblende; Fleming wasn’t planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mold; Watson and Crick weren’t imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA; Rowland and Molina weren’t planning to implicate CFCs in ozone when they began studying stratospheric photochemistry. These discoveries-and a multitude of others that grace and characterize our time, to some of which our very lives are beholden-were made ultimately by scientists given the opportunity to explore what, in their opinion and under the scrutiny of their peers, were basic questions in Nature. Of course there are many pressing problems facing our nation and our species. But reducing basic scientific research is not the way to solve them. Scientists do not constitute a voting bloc. They have no effective lobby. However, much of their work is in everybody’s interest. Backing off from fundamental research constitutes a failure of nerve, of imagination, and of that vision thing that we still don’t seem to have a handle on. Carl Sagan, “Where Did TV Come From” Parade Magazine, 1995
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