Sexually Rejected Flies Turn To Booze

While you perhaps could have been more eloquent, you have a point. Malnutrition is a terrible problem and needs to be more effectively addressed on an international level. Allowing people fleeing hunger in their home country refugee status in other countries would help, as would more thoughtful subsidy policy, better access to seeds and fertilizers, less social stigma about being poor, and more efficient use of existing resources. To be fair, the number of malnurished people has generally declined over the last several decades as a fraction of world population so something is being done about the problem, but there's still nearly a billion people (yes, three times the population of the US) who suffer from malnutrition each year.

On the other hand, there several arguments in favor of this research:
? * One never knows when and where pure research will pay off. Science builds on previous work, so who knows what will become of this? Is it inconceivable that a more effective method of dealing with mosquito-borne malaria might come of this? That's just one possible route to an application out of innumerable ones, most of which I can't conceive of now.
? * Many believe knowledge has intrinsic value beyond practical applications. I agree. Stupidity is humanity's single worst plague, and it is fought with both knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. Spreading science--which ideally embodies evidenced-based, rigorous reasoning--by funding scientists fights stupidity effectively (though scientists could stand to be better communicators, on the whole).
? * Other branches of academic research have even less hope of achieving applicability. Literary analysis and some corners of math and theoretical physics come to mind. Why pick on this one?

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/t2Gc6y6RAIM/sexually-rejected-flies-turn-to-booze

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