GAO to NIH: Keep your house in order

Perhaps what we need is a clear distinction between "immediate outcomes" research and "new discovery" research. By "new discovery" I don't mean running a gazillion assays through a machine to find a chemical that behaves in a specific way, but rather new concepts or new ways of doing things or thinking about things. Sometimes such "new discovery" research takes longer than you might think, and the discovery process takes you down paths that twist and turn in unexpected ways, and the paths may even branch, or seem to branch, and you don't have the resources to go down both paths at once so you flip a coin and choose, never knowing where that other path might have led. If this sounds poetical, or existential, well, yes, it is. But think of where we would be today, in terms of scientific knowledge, if scientists hadn't taken such existential, or poetical, or off-the-beaten-path risks. We wouldn't know very much, would we, if all that scientists ever did was work within the confines of existing knowledge -- clearly, the sun and moon both revolve around the earth (we can see that with our own eyes, right?). Yet, even when we thought the sun moved around the earth, we were able to use the information we had at the time to calculate the seasonal changes, the time of day, etc. etc. -- practical, useful knowledge based on filling in obvious knowledge gaps. Nothing wrong with being able to plan a planting season. And you don't need to know about black holes and distant galaxies to do that. That's important -- which is why incremental research is important for the short term. But we do need to know about distant galaxies and black holes (well, I think we do -- some may argue that point, I guess), which is why "meaningful" and even "frivolous" research is important and should not be shut out of the process by establishing "rules" that eliminate such projects from consideration for support.