>As far as focusing on more popular areas, where's the evidence that there's necessarily anything wrong with that Imagine researchers want to do some new resea

>As far as focusing on more popular areas, where's the evidence that there's necessarily anything wrong with that Imagine researchers want to do some new research into some kind of surgery in hopes of it eventually being useful for humans. They're deciding what animal to perform the research with and the two options are geckos or dogs. Everything they know suggests using geckos would provide more beneficial data for this experiment, but with dogs they know they could run a PR campaign about how they're helping injured dogs and use a regular stream of photos to maintain public support. This is a BS hypothetical, but it's fairly easy to imagine many teams picking the option that does worse research but provides more funding. edit and this is assuming everybody requesting research grants is well intentioned.