>someone should build upon and improve upon these results. I'm also not from a biology background - but I remember from doing philosophy, it was much more usef

>someone should build upon and improve upon these results. I'm also not from a biology background - but I remember from doing philosophy, it was much more useful to find a paper that made some trivial advance in a very specialized area that you were interested in, than ten 'general' papers. I mean, if you're building something, and somebody has written a paper that addresses a part of your domain, it's gold dust - even if it's generally too niche for anybody to bother reading, even if it's substandard work. You're right that there are some kind of perverse incentives in the hothouse-production of phd theses, but I think in general, people should embrace the triviality and irrelevance of scientific work. Alchemy set out to answer the big questions of eternal life, and gold from lead, and ended up answering nothing. Science set out to answer questions like, how are colours in flower petals passed through generations? If you look at the history of 'big questions', it's way less illustrious than that of small, boring ones.