Research funding - Worthwhile answers cost real money

In one of the great scenes in one of the great television series Homer Simpson is philosophising from his couch as he uses his TV’s remote control to flick aimlessly from channel to channel.

This bucolic, domestic idyll provokes a line that celebrates the habit of taking human achievement for granted and points to a kind of blindness to the wonderful discoveries of science that is probably all too common.

“What,” asks our languid Plato, “has science ever done for me?” as satellites orbiting the globe thousands of miles above Springfield more or less instantaneously respond to his remote-control button hopping.