Here's your periodic reminder that basic research is only "useless" until it suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world. 20 years ago, coronavirology was an obscure sub-field the public never heard about. Good thing we funded it anyway. #nCoV

— Alan Dove (@alandove) January 24, 2020

Constantly hearing both conservative and “progressive” mooks screech about how we are funding “useless” research really pisses me off. No research is useless, really, because we never know exactly what matters. Often we don’t know something is relevant for 100 years or more. Simply put, most people aren’t very smart or very curious so they can only imagine 15 minutes out, if that. Often not even that.