Yes, and I think there's no disagreement. The question is simply what's the best way to realize that goal?
I would just cite, in concluding, a comment made by Noam Chomsky. He may be known to many of you as a left-wing critic of American foreign policy and also as one of the most respected linguists in the world. He was giving a talk to our counterpart organization in New Zealand a year or two ago. Chomsky said to them: You know, I've spent my entire life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and for most of the 35 years I've been there, the principal source of funding was the U.S. military, through the Pentagon. More recently it's been corporate funding. What I would say is that things have gotten worse as it's gone from the military. My whole life I've been a critic of the military, but the military, the Pentagon, understood that when it undertook funding, it funded basic research and had faith that ideas of use to it would come by trusting scientists to do what they thought was useful. Increasingly nowadays we're getting more demands that the researcher be able to identify realizable goals as a result of the research as a condition of getting funding.
So that's what Chomsky said, and I found it ironic in a certain sense. But I think large sections do understand the value of basic research.