ZapperZ discusses Public Impatience With Science, or the importance of doing basic research now so that people can do applied research later and bring new and useful technology to market in the future.

This ties in what I was talking about in my last entry, (and earlier than that) because while there are the funding organizations and agencies out there trying to drive applied research who also fund some basic research, it is usually in a narrow scope. Funding, overall, needs to expand in breadth and depth. What needs to be remembered is that advances and discoveries have a way of expanding and being adopted by other researchers, even crossing the traditional lines between disciplines, but it takes time to diffuse.

Even within the sciences themselves, many forget that some of the advancement in biochemistry, for example, were brought about because of something that was developed in physics years before. Synchrotron light sources came out of research in high energy physics, and it took many decades before the field of biochemistry, medicine, and pharmacy realized that such facilities can be valuable to their work.

And what is originally a heroic effort to observe some result will eventually become a standard lab practice or tool (BEC being a good example), allowing more advanced inquiry, but again, it takes time for this to happen.