In last month's State of the Union address, President Barack Obama announced a "moonshot" to cure cancer, and just a few weeks before, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted a call to cure Alzheimer's disease within 10 years. These goals are quite ambitious. And the only way we'll reach them is if we embrace the reality that scientific breakthroughs often arise when we aren't even looking for them.
Biomedical research comes in two flavors. Basic research asks, "How does some aspect of biology work?" Translational research asks, "How can I apply this knowledge to fix a problem in biology?" Although these approaches should work hand-in-hand, they compete for research dollars, and the latter is currently more popular. When Obama and Clinton backed up their challenges to find cures with proposals to increase funding for research by $1-2 billion, they were talking about translational research, echoing calls for these "smarter" investments in science. But, as the president's new proposal to cut the National Institutes of Health base budget demonstrates, these calls often come at the expense of basic research, and it would be a mistake to trade one for the other.
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