The reason most scientists do routine safe work is that they need to publish a certain number of papers per year to get or keep their job. If you work on somet

The reason most scientists do routine safe work is that they need to publish a certain number of papers per year to get or keep their job. If you work on something important, spend a couple years on it, and go nowhere, your career may be over. It also was different 50 years ago, when almost any scientist with a PhD could get a decent tenure-track job. Now, there's a severe oversupply of PhDs, which means a lot of them need to scramble to survive instead of working on important problems.