I strongly disagree. The public (let's take the 75% of the educational attainment level folks, excluding PhDs, so non-academic people who are educated enough)

I strongly disagree. The public (let's take the 75% of the educational attainment level folks, excluding PhDs, so non-academic people who are educated enough) knows nothing about research, how research is conducted, what a paper is, how a paper is published. Zero clues. You can imagine what the bottom 75% think. Researchers are considered by the public to be little to no more than glorified teachers. It is like saying that bigger and better weapons are invented and built to justify the Defense budget to the public, where for the public a bomb is a bomb is a bomb. How do I know? (1) I was an academic and I often had low-level conversations about my research, in my home country, in the U.S., in Europe, South America, everywhere. Not a single interlocutor outside of academia knew what is the typical process to follow to have some research results published in a scientific journal, or whether a publication in a certain journal can be indicative of more or less cited/quality research. (2) I read comments here and there on newspapers, forums, social media, etc. Letters to the editor of your local newspaper are considered to be equivalent to a publication in Cell. (3) Ask, for fun, like I used to do, your regular guy if (a) an electron is bigger than an atom, (b) how many people live on earth. Re: research is useless. Most academic science is useless, and the uselessness of 95 percent of research is somehow considered inevitable by the "scientific community." But in that 95 percent there is a portion of research that is speculative and ultimately turns out to be useless, which is a good thing to have, and a portion of research (the majority) that serves only to pay the salaries of the researchers involved, is clear to everyone and their cousin that it will go nowhere, and is published in journals that no one, and rightly so, will ever read.