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Who's got the guts to go to the moon?

OR: "Look, ma! I'm pretending to cure cancer!"

The National Science Foundation gives out “Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research” (EAGER) that are supposed to support “high risk-high payoff” work that “involves radically different approaches, applies new expertise, or engages novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.” These are some projects they’ve funded: At the beginning of the 1900s, the two leading theories for Goitergeddon were “there’s some bad microbes in Switzerland” and “Swiss people are undergoing racial degeneration.” When a rural doctor named Heinrich Henziger was like, “Maybe it’s caused by a lack of iodine,” the medical authorities shouted him down. Her bosses at the University of Pennsylvania denied her promotions and restricted her access to lab space and supplies, describing her at one point as “not of faculty quality.” Now they’re all singin’ a different tune, not least because the technology she patented has since earned UPenn more than a billion dollars.

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