And in a similar vein... Douglas Prasher did a lot of the foundational work on GFP (2010 Nobel Prize) was driving a courtesy shuttle at a Toyota dealership in

And in a similar vein... Douglas Prasher did a lot of the foundational work on GFP (2010 Nobel Prize) was driving a courtesy shuttle at a Toyota dealership in 2008 because he ran out of funding. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren had a really tough time convincing people that H. pylori caused stomachs ulcers (but won the 2005 Nobel Prize). Number theory was famously nothing more than an intellectual curiosity, but makes stuff like this website possible. Microbial opsins were also a weird intellectual backwater before becoming vital to neuroscience. Paul Lauterbur famously quipped that "you could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature." We are really bad at predicting the future impact of projects and people, and it's important to recognize that as a counterweight to schemes that try to select for "excellence." Things that seem laughable at the time can also be the basis for future breakthroughs, so take stupid things like Rand Pauls' ranting about silly-sounding projects with a mountain of salt.