[tikej]

> This is the central plague of all academic research, that its the pursuit of novel understanding before useful application.

Plague of all academic research?! Isn't the point of academic research to understand before application (and quite often application is not the goal at all and that's ok)?

I get that it may seem trivial to apply something, but with high-cost risks of mistakes when they happen in biology/medicine it is not.

The pharma industry learned this the hard way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

It seems to me that some software engineers/computer scientist think that other fields are slow/full stupid people because the progress is not fast. Well the progress is not fast because cost to start is often huge, wetware can't be moved to cloud, stakes are higher than unhappy customers etc.