A lifelong family friend brought up the subject of government-funded science at a family cookout recently, and was surprised to hear my opposition to it. “Well, I don’t think we should be taxing people to study the sex life of quails on cocaine,” I responded jokingly. As best as I can remember, the conversation that followed with this brilliant woman in her 50s—who in younger days was just a dissertation away from a PhD in chemistry—went along these lines: “That’s just the problem. You don’t know the incredible benefit of all this research. Even the quail study has a scientific basis that...
