She is not a scientist active in this area. At this point she is for the most part paid to be a science communicator. A lot of money is spend on curing all thes

She is not a scientist active in this area. At this point she is for the most part paid to be a science communicator. A lot of money is spend on curing all these other things. Particle accelerators have been instrumental in developing the technology for hadron radiation therapy (there are now special purpose one just for cancer treatment) and superconducting magnets (useful for MRT medical devices). If you examine it closely a lot of advances in biology and medicine were thanks to technical advances made by physics. They have been a really solid bet so far and have created trillions of dollars in value. Why not let them have some fun and let them chase their McGuffin, which btw. might be totally real and interesting fundamental physics. The high energy particle physics community is doing ground breaking research on radiation hard imaging sensors, large scale super conducting power distribution (which might be useful for connecting solar power in a lossless manner to consumers). These projects are a way to train high skilled STEM people (competition to stay at CERN is brutal, but most go on to industry) in a structured way that then work on a lot of other societally relevant problems.