The usefulness of useless knowledge

My title is taken from an address given by Abraham Flexner 25 years ago at the opening of the Squibb Institute for Medical Research. I admit the plagiarism without embarrassment because I knew Dr. Flexner well for most of my life and felt the depth of his concern for true learning, so that I am confident he would have given his approval to the use to which I am going to put his paradox. In his address he concluded that we should “continue our quest for the useless as well as the useful, confident that in the long run both will inure to the benefit of humanity, as they have already done. …” He felt that true scholarship was irresistible and, in addition, could be profitable. As an example, he used the abstruse and remote calculations of Clerk Maxwell on magnetism, made with no concern for their utility, which were absolutely essential to the practical invention of wireless telegraphy by Marconi. Though not in the apocalyptic terms now justifiable, in 1938 Flexner had the foresight to predict that the researches into atomic structure of Rutherford, Bohr, Millikan, and Einstein, made out of sheer curiosity, would have revolutionary effects on modern life, just as the discoveries of Ehrlich, Pasteur, Koch, and Theobald Smith, who were following only their noses, led to veritable revolutions in medicine. That this is a fundamental and continuing truth is demonstrated by the effects of the nonutilitarian researches of Fleming, Dubos, and Waksman, which provided the basis for the modern revolution in the treatment of infectious disease.