From Lizard Spit to Ozempic

Yet, that exact line of inquiry eventually yielded one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the twenty-first century.

The Theater of Anti-Science Populism

Politicians have a long-standing tradition of weaponizing complex or unusual scientific research for cheap political points. Anti-science bias and fiscal performativity drive this formula. – Take a highly specialized, basic research grant, strip away its context, mock its title, and present it to the public as an egregious waste of money.

“The true scientist never loses a sense of wonder, but the politician often loses a sense of perspective. To look at a budget line item and mock what you do not understand is the ultimate luxury of the uneducated.”

~ Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind

This political strategy was famously institutionalized in 1975 by Senator William Proxmire through his monthly “Golden Fleece Award.” Proxmire used the award to publicly humiliate government agencies, frequently targeting basic scientific research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). By hunting for jargon-heavy or bizarre-sounding studies, he succeeded in creating a lasting chilling effect that forced scientists to sanitize their grant titles just to avoid political targeting.

Today, this legacy lives on. Politicians routinely publish “waste reports” designed to generate quick headlines by ridiculing foundational research. The core flaw in this political grandstanding is a fundamental misunderstanding—or deliberate ignoring—of how scientific discovery actually works. Politicians demand immediate, predictable commercial applications from every dollar spent. But history demonstrates that applied science cannot exist without the bedrock of basic science, and curiosity—not guaranteed outcomes—drives basic science.

This risk is not theoretical; it is not old news: it is playing out right now in today’s headlines with the sudden, unprecedented dismissal of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) oversight board. By dismantling an independent body designed to shield peer-reviewed inquiry from partisan influence, the government is actively breaking the firewalls protecting foundational research. Hollowing out these accountability structures in real-time strips away the insulation of merit-based discovery, leaving basic science immediately vulnerable to shifting political mandates and paralyzing long-term innovation.

When “Useless” Research Saves the World

When we examine the specific studies that politicians have historically lambasted, the gap between political rhetoric and scientific reality becomes stark.

“Throughout the whole history of science, most of the really great discoveries which have ultimately proved to be of the greatest practical importance have been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful, but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.”

~ Abraham Flexner, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

Consider the infamous case of the “shrimp on a treadmill.” In 2011, this project was prominently featured in political reports attacking the NSF as a symbol of taxpayer abuse. To a populist politician, building a custom treadmill for crustaceans sounds like a punchline. In reality, biologists tested how marine life handles bacterial infections when low oxygen and high carbon dioxide stress the environment. – These are stressors directly caused by coastal pollution. Understanding how environmental degradation compromises the immune systems of marine life is foundational for tracking ecosystem health and protecting the commercial seafood industry.

Similarly, basic research into the mating habits of insects was once the gold standard of political ridicule. Mid-century lawmakers repeatedly mocked scientists studying the sex lives of the screwworm fly, demanding to know why public funds were spent on such trivialities. The scientists discovered a specific biological quirk: female screwworms mate only once in their lifetime. By leveraging this niche piece of information, researchers developed the Sterile Insect Technique, releasing millions of laboratory-sterilized male flies to completely eradicate the flesh-eating parasite from North America. The value of that heavily mocked study is being proven at this very moment; as Texas battles a critical 2026 outbreak of New World screwworm threatening the multi-billion dollar livestock industry, the sterile fly infrastructure developed decades ago remains our primary line of defense.

The pattern repeats across every scientific discipline. In 1978, NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) received a Golden Fleece Award from Proxmire, who mocked it as a multi-million dollar boondoggle to look for “Martians.” Yet, the daunting task of sifting through massive oceans of cosmic static forced scientists to pioneer entirely new computational paradigms. SETI directly birthed high-performance distributed computing—transforming the way the modern internet shares processing power—while its advanced digital signal processing algorithms laid the groundwork for the noise-filtering tech inside every global cellular network. Today, the ultra-fast data analysis models and machine learning frameworks built to recognize alien patterns are used day to day on the ground to power automated medical diagnostics, optimize supply chains, and train modern artificial intelligence.

Even the ‘study of sludge’ in a hot spring was once viewed as academic navel-gazing. When researchers in the 1960s used public funds to study bacteria living in the near-boiling thermal pools of Yellowstone National Park, critics questioned and lambasted the utility of looking at microbes in boiling water. Decades later, when scientists needed a heat-resistant enzyme to make the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) viable, they found it in that exact Yellowstone bacterium. Today, PCR powers global medical diagnostics, criminal forensics, and the entire biotechnology sector.

The same short-sightedness targeted abstract mathematics. For decades, complex mathematical models of “game theory” and auction design were lampooned by fiscal conservatives as academic gibberish. In 1994, the Federal Communications Commission used that exact “useless” math to completely redesign how the nation’s electromagnetic spectrum was auctioned off. Rather than relying on arbitrary lotteries, the government used game-theory formulas, a move that has since generated over $200 billion for the U.S. Treasury while efficiently organizing the wireless infrastructure that powers every smartphone on earth.

Unweaving the Rainbow

In his book Unweaving the Rainbow, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins addresses this exact tension. He argues against the narrow, purely utilitarian view of science, asserting that understanding the deep mechanics of nature has immense value for its own sake. Crucially, Dawkins notes that when we pursue science out of fundamental curiosity, it regularly brings forth totally unforeseen practical benefits that could never have been planned in a boardroom or predicted by a politician.

“Newton’s unweaving of the rainbow was not a destruction of its beauty, but an elevation of it. To understand how the colors separate is to witness a grander poetry than any mere myth could ever invent.”

~ Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

This brings us back to the Gila monster and the essay I read that inspired me to write this post. I was amused and fascinated about the obscure, humble origins of these new GLP-1 medications that are transforming the lives of so many. I learned that decades ago, researchers studying the fundamental biology of venomous reptiles discovered a specific peptide in the lizard’s saliva that mimics a human hormone regulating blood sugar, but with one critical advantage: it lasted far longer in the body. That basic curiosity-driven research laid the direct foundation for the development of modern GLP-1 receptor agonists—the blockbuster diabetes and weight loss medications like Ozempic that are currently transforming global health.

Open-ended scientific inquiry—where discovery is not wholly driven by a predetermined product, and the exact path to utility is unknown—is not new.
In the late seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton spent his time in a darkened room boring holes in window shutters and placing simple glass prisms into the beams of light. To an outside observer—or a modern politician looking for waste—spending days watching colors bend on a wall might have seemed like a childish, trivial exercise. Yet, Newton’s obsession with the fundamental nature of light dismantled centuries of scientific misunderstanding and laid the groundwork for optics, spectroscopy, astronomy, and the laser technologies that drive modern physics and computing.

When politicians demand that science only focus on immediate, profitable, obvious results, they are asking to reap the harvest without ever planting the seeds. The next time a public official mocks a scientific study because it sounds strange, niche, or unglamorous, history suggests we should pay closer attention. The answers to humanity’s greatest challenges are often hiding in the most unexpected places—even in the saliva of a desert lizard.