Pure research pot needs replenishing

Albert Einstein, the world's most famous scientist, is the epitome of the "pure" scientist. Of his many abstract and theoretical discoveries, he won the Nobel Prize for his part in the development of quantum physics -- laws that dictate the bizarre behaviour of matter on the microscopic scale. Out of these laws came the advent of the laser, once described as "a solution searching for a problem," and now used billions of times every day performing tasks such as laser surgery, reading super-market bar codes and playing CDs. Quantum physics also gave us modern computer chips, the world's most powerful microscope and nuclear energy (including the atomic bomb, but that's another can of worms altogether). Incredibly huge and expensive particle accelerators have been built for the purpose of finding and studying the most obscure and elusive bits of matter, elementary particles. What was to have been the biggest and most expensive particle accelerator was partly built in Texas in the early 90s before the U.S. Congress scrapped it. We do not know how society will benefit from studying these exotic particles. We do, however, know how society has benefited from the discovery of the positron, the electron's antimatter twin. It is now routinely used to detect brain cancer using the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scan.