
The danger in philosophizing about science is that theory and generalization 
can end up being far removed from the actual day-to-day of the grunt at the
bench.  Yes, its great to be involved in a process were I can walk into the
lab after a heavy night of dreaming and just do something for the hell of it
(as long as my advisor doesn't catch me - which is easy enough to do), but 
stamping out such behavior seems to be the purpose in life of grant review 
committees and the peer review process in general.  In today's world that's 
what determines what science is: what gets funded.  And a damn good thing to.
Flights of fantasy just don't have much chance of producing anything, at 
least not in biomedical research.  The surest way for a graduate student to
ruin their life is to work in a lab where the boss is more concerned with 
fleshing out his/her fantasies than with having the student work on a project
that actually has a good chance of producing some results.  MD's seem to 
be particularly prone to this aberrant behavior.  


I have to agree with Gary Merrill's response to this.  I've read alot of the
Alu and middle repetitive sequence work and it's really very interesting, 
good work with implications for many fields in molecular genetics.  It's 
really an example of how a well reasoned project turned up interesting 
results that were unexpected.