[fabian2k]

Memorizing things is not useless. Learning concepts and principles is more important, but you also need some amount of facts memorized to make use of them.

For example, I had to memorize the structural formulas for all amino acids in university. This does seem a bit useless at first, but is actually very important the moment you work with protein sequences or structures. You might not need the exact structure, but if you read about a specific important residue in a protein or a mutation in one you need to understand the properties of the involved amino acids to make sense to this. And if you had to look that up every time you'd never get through a paper.