First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

No, this isn't another story about some selfish miserly person learning the value of kindness and generosity. Charles Dickens told that particular tale better than anyone before or since. But it is a story with a happy ending, and a moral that I believe is worth remembering. It's a story about the value of basic, hypothesis-driven research. I think the story is important because in the age of genomics such research is increasingly taken for granted, if not slighted. Discovery-driven research is so much flashier, so much easier to sell to funding agencies and government officials since it is, by definition, guaranteed to produce results. By discovery-driven research I mean research that seeks simply to collect data: the sequencing of the human genome is the obvious example. Another example would be any of the structural genomics or proteomics initiatives; these are, in essence, cataloging exercises. I don't mean to disparage such activity - in biology it has a long and honorable history. Charles Darwin's expedition on the Beagle was a cataloging exercise, and from it sprang the single most important tenet in the life sciences, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. There is nothing at all wrong with cataloging, especially if someone with the genius of Darwin (or, to be fair, Alfred Russell Wallace) peruses the catalog.