On a number of occasions, the funding of basic scientific research has become a punching bag for politicians that are hoping to score points by hyping government waste or stoking the culture wars. To be fair, it can often be difficult to understand what the practical use of some of the research we fund might be, whether it's sending a rover to Mars or diving into the genetics of fruit flies. To make the case that this basic research is important, a number of Congressmen and a group of pro-science organizations have gotten together to hand out the Golden Goose awards, which focus on the economy-boosting output of basic research.

Highlighting government spending, especially if it's of the "wasteful" variety, isn't exactly a new thing. One of its foremost practitioners, William Proxmire, handed out a monthly "Golden Fleece" award for over a decade (notably, Proxmire was a Democrat, suggesting the issue has bipartisan appeal). And science funding isn't immune from problems. Many projects, including the Curiosity rover, have seen delays and/or gone over budget. And there's little doubt that grant money has been allocated to projects that ultimately turned out to be misguided.

But it's been hard to shake the feeling that some of the criticisms were even more misguided than the worst of the science. While campaigning, Sarah Palin spent time criticizing fruit fly research, apparently unaware that different species of these flies are either agricultural pests or one of the most sophisticated systems for studying genetics available. And the House leadership suggested that the public might want to recheck the funding decisions made by the National Science Foundation. In other cases, specific grants that focus on public health issues related to drug use or sexually transmitted diseases have attracted the ire of culture warriors, upset that their tax money is going to track sexual behavior.

Even in the best of cases, however, basic research that isn't directed toward some sort of technology or medical application can be a hard sell. Sure, knowing more about the natural world is a good thing, but what has it done for us lately?

A bipartisan group of Congressmen would like you to know. Six of them (the list is at the bottom of this page) have gotten together with a number of science and research organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science to award the Golden Goose awards. The brainchild of Tennessee's Jim Cooper, the awards highlight basic research that ended up providing a huge boost to the economy or health research.

The first set of awards were given out yesterday, and they honor some significant achievements, some of them Nobel-Prize-worthy. Charles Townes is cited for his development of the maser, a forerunner of the lasers that are now ubiquitous. Townes persisted in his work despite the fact that "[t]he project sounded frivolous even to his colleagues, who told him directly that they thought he was wasting the university’s money." If that had actually been true, he would have also been wasting the money he received from the National Science Foundation and US Navy.

Another set of Nobelists who got a further honor this year are the people who discovered and developed Green Fluorescent Protein, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien. Found in jellyfish from the Pacific Northwest and first applied to trace cells in a small transparent worm, variants of this protein are now used in a huge number of research contexts, had have enabled countless new techniques in biology. Plus, biotech companies make some healthy cash by selling GFP-focused products.

The group I knew the least about, Jon Weber (now deceased), Eugene White, Rodney White, and Della Roy, accomplished something similar. They started out by studying the microscopic structure inside corals, which certainly qualifies as basic research without an obvious application. But Rodney White happened to be a med student, and he noticed that the structures studied by his uncle had properties that would make them ideal for the natural regrowth of tissue. Roy figured out how to make similar structures out of a material that had better structural properties, and the result is an implant used in bone grafts that allows the natural regrowth of healthy tissue.

Two of the Golden Goose's Congressional supporters have backgrounds in research administration, while one (New Jersey's Rush Holt) actually has a PhD in physics. But the remainder simply seem to be fans of basic science.

In coming up with the award, they've also done a nifty bit of salesmanship. As the past political posturing has shown, it's easy to take a single basic research project and ask, "how could this possibly be valuable?" The new awards essentially turn that logic on its head, asking instead, "how could we have possibly gotten here without basic research?"

Cooper and AAAS president Alan Leshner have an editorial in the Washington Post that announces the awards and defends the funding of basic science.