The Value of Useless Knowledge

🍏your Sunday read 6th April, 2025

A well-researched original piece to get you thinking.

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Hi Scholar,

This week’s Sunday Read is inspired by an essay published in 1939 arguing for us to embrace curiosity in research. As I read it, two thoughts ran through my mind: first, how obvious the premise of the essay seemed to be (of course research is driven by curiosity) and then, how the word “curiosity” seems to have disappeared from our discourse on research. If curiosity has indeed been replaced in our way of doing research, then what has taken it’s place?

Grab a beverage and your reading glasses, let's get thinking.

The Value of Useless Knowledge

Written by The Tatler

The most socially acceptable answer to give when asked why one decided to go into research, or become a scientist, is “to improve the condition of society in some way”. In addition to the approving smile one usually receives from the person who asked the question, it also makes us feel good about ourselves; our work matters because it is useful; our work serves a purpose. 

However, and I’m sure you see where this is going, dear scholar, very few of us are initially drawn to research for the value it can bring to society. Think back to a time when you were inspired to pursue a question, to propose a hypothesis - I’m sure that delicious feeling was rooted, not in your desire to simply just do good, but in pure curiosity. The pleasure of asking difficult questions, thinking hard about why things are the way they are and then seeking answers is, this essay will argue, an essential part of research. This essence is also being eroded by a turn to focusing on what outcome may be gained from research, rather than what may be gained from the process of doing research. 

For Health and Wealth: The Rise of Homo Scientificus

Shrinking research budgets, pressing societal problems with very real effects on our well-being and the understanding of ourselves as homo economicus (the “rational economic man”) handed to us by modern economic thinking have combined to create the image of science, research, and knowledge as a tool for maximizing utility. 

Elsevier, the world’s largest publishing company by number of articles, exists “for the benefit of society.” Research at the University of Oxford “helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems.” The National Science Foundation was established by the US Government to “advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare.”  

All of these institutions tell us the same thing: to be a researcher is to produce value. On the surface of things, is that really so unreasonable? Money is scarce, the time of researchers is finite, and the challenges facing us are urgent: why shouldn’t we want to know what use will come of research before enabling it? In this environment, resources need to be well spent and should give us something worth having, preferably something that makes us healthier and/or wealthier.

Behold, the rise of homo scientificus: researchers who, through rational thinking, are able to perfectly identify the cause of the pressing problems facing society and allocate funding efficiently to solve those problems.

Homo scientificus seeks to maximize utility by proposing, funding, and conducting research that addresses these problems for the benefit of human society.

In this way, curiosity, as the fuel that powers our research culture, has been replaced by utility.

As well as pushing research forward, funding bodies want to make sure that their money is being well spent. They do this by creating competition, which in theory should lead to the most promising research projects getting funded and more efficient use of funds, and by measuring the impact of research they have already funded, typically by using metrics like citations.

As well as pushing research forward, funding bodies want to make sure that their money is being well spent. They do this by creating competition, which in theory should lead to the most promising research projects getting funded and more efficient use of funds, and by measuring the impact of research they have already funded, typically by using metrics like citations.

The results are research proposals designed to be funded, a preference for well-established theories and methods over novel ideas, and a need to predict the outcomes of your research to gain funding. 

If continuous refinement of well-established theories is what will solve the world's problems, then perhaps we are heading in the right direction. But if we need new ideas, and by extension a system that fosters new ideas, it’s possible that our current setup is in need of a few tweaks.  

One might suspect that something important -  like the power of curiosity - is being lost. But it's nearly impossible to observe what could have been. We can’t, unfortunately, count the innovations that never happened. We can, however, go back to a point in history when the attitude toward funding research was not so focused on utility as it has become. 

The Value of Useless Knowledge

In the 1930s, the Institute for Advanced Study was established to fulfill the vision of its founding director, Abraham Flexner. The aim was to create:

The Institute for Advanced Study went on to be affiliated with scientists whose work was recognized by prestigious awards such as the Nobel Prize. Similar values shaped the period of post-WW2 research in the USA, which was defined by an emphasis on basic research and academic freedom. 

In an essay titled “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Flexner argued passionately for achieving the utility we all demand from science by relying on our propensity to do good with curiosity:

To Flexner, there was little difference between artists and scientists. Flexner believed in the sanctity of unbounded curiosity: if artist-scientists were given funding and left alone, they were likely to produce knowledge for which a use would eventually be found. He cites, among many others, the example of the radio: the theoretical work needed to produce a radio was completed 20 years before the first radio was produced. At the time the theory was published, it had no clear application except theoretical contributions to mathematics.

In “pleading for the abolition of the word ‘use’, and for the freeing of the human spirit,” Flexner appeals to the scholar-romantic in us, the version of ourselves that enjoys our curiosity. But his vision stands at odds with the purpose given to us by our institutions outlined earlier. For this reason, it would be easy to dismiss Flexner's ideology as idealistic, impractical and laissez-faire - it’s difficult to imagine a grant committee agreeing to fund the freeing of a curious human spirit in the hope for a return on their investment 20 years later.

Flexner’s intuition wasn’t naïve. Modern scientific breakthroughs like CRISPR emerged from exactly the kind of curiosity-driven inquiry he championed. The discovery of CRISPR, a gene editing technology that is being applied to human diseases, was the result of years of research by Francisco Mojica into an observation he made as a PhD student in 1992, for no other reason than it sparked his curiosity. After 12 years of research, Mojica realized what he had observed was evidence of an immune system in bacteria. When he was finally ready to publish, Mojica was initially rejected by several journals for the work lacking “importance”; one wonders what would have been different had he directed his attention to human immune systems instead. In 2008, an application for CRISPR as a gene editing tool was proposed, and the tool was developed in 2013: 21 years after Mojica’s initial observation. 

The story of graphene, a material made of carbon only one atom thick, follows a similar pattern. Graphene was theoretically proposed in 1947 and produced for the first time in 2004: two scientists would regularly try silly experiments together on Friday evenings and it was during one of these sessions that they stumbled upon the method to produce graphene. 

Due to his language, which today seems so “unscientific,” we might struggle to take Flexner’s ideology seriously. But it rests on a solid set of principles: 

1. Important work takes time. This includes time for the work to “mature” (or find an application) and also the time of the artist-scientist, which should be protected from activities that eat into their time like administration.

2. “Useless knowledge” is just another way of saying theoretical knowledge. Practical work with useful applications is dependent on a body of theoretical knowledge. 

3. Curiosity is an excellent motivator for an artist-scientist. Intellectual freedom to explore ideas for the sake of their own curiosity is vital.          

Flexner’s belief - that curiosity can be trusted to lead us somewhere meaningful - offers a compelling alternative to the utility-obsessed research culture of homo scientificus. It’s worth remembering that some of the most transformative scientific breakthroughs were never the product of clear objectives or measurable goals, but of open-ended inquiry and intellectual freedom.

Though we don’t hear it often in mission statements or grant applications, making room for pure curiosity, freeing the human spirit, is not a luxury. It is the essence of research.

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