The Golden Goose Award, or Your Tax Dollars at Work

I just learned about one of the best ideas ever to come from an American Congressman, the Golden Goose Awards. These awards

demonstrate the human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure or unusual studies that have led to major breakthroughs and have had a significant impact on society.

The idea seems to have come from Jim Cooper (D-Tenn). There is a certain unfairness about the awards, since the point is to reward people who did cool research without caring about any future applications, but whose discoveries ended up being used in ways they did not imagine. But what a great way to make people understand that the basic research behind our important technologies often seemed crazy when it was done. The first winners of the award are:

Charles Townes, who won the Nobel Prize in 1964 for his work on lasers, done before anyone had any idea what they might be used for.

Eugene White, Rodney White, Della Roy, and the late Jon Weber, whose study of tropical coral led to a material now often used for bone grafts.

Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien, and Osamu Shimomura.

Shinomura gets the prize for one of the most obscure-ever studies that ended up being important, since he only set out to determine how green jellyfish glow. That work ended up supplying the technology we now use to make active tissues glow, so scientists can see which ones are doing what; this research won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2008.