Scinetists and other researchers should focus their research on areas that are likely to benefit the greatest number of people

Science has been a key element in history that has helped the humanity to flourish and make improvements. Hence, a majority of people are now living convenient and satisfactory lives without any lack of fulfillment of basic needs. The given prompt contends that scientists and researchers should focus on fields that are more likely to benefit the maximum number of people. However, I mostly disagree with this position for two reasons that will be discussed below. Nevertheless, I do concede that science should be advanced in a direction that may improve the people’s quality of life.
First of all, scientists and researchers should not focus only on fields that are most likely to be advantageous to overall society because they cannot predict whether the research on a specific field would lead to a significant advancement in people’s lives. For instance, atomic physics in the mid-twentieth century was a nascent field of physics, and people did not know what the implication would be by conducting intensive research on this field. However, due to scientists’ endeavor on this field, many countries around the world are now able to utilize atomic energy that enables people to produce considerable amount of electricity. If scientists had only focused on research that would most likely to yield to the most benefit at that time, the world nowadays might have still suffered from a lack of electricity. Since science is full of uncertainty, a field that seems unpromising and unviable to society may actually have the most profound impact on the humanity. Therefore, scientists and researchers should not limit their fields that seems prospective and reliable.
Secondly, besides the unpredictability of scientific research, experts and scientists should not confine themselves to focus on promising areas because scientific fields are thoroughly interconnected. For example, chemistry and biology have been the two scientific fields that have been inseparable. Even though biology seems more likely to result in promising outcomes in research, this cannot be achieved without prior experiments and theorization in chemistry. Specifically, if one needs to understand the mechanism of metabolism in animals, he or she must have knowledge about how the combustive reaction, one of the chemical reactions, proceeds. In contrast, if scientists only focus on biology and neglect conducting research in chemistry, they are unlikely to produce desirable results in biological research. Hence, various areas in science are firmly interwoven with one another and cannot be inspected in isolation. If other fields are studied together, this will produce a synergy to advance overall scientific fields.
Admittedly, focusing research on areas that are prone to benefit the greatest number of people can save substantial amount of cost that may be used in other purposes. For instance, experiments utilizing the CERN, a huge particle accelerator with a radius of 10 kilometers in Switzerland, requires astronomical scale of investment. Due to its prohibitive cost in experiments, residents dwelling near the CERN often suffer from blackout due to the lack of electricity that is used for the experiments. Rather than infringing the residents’ quality of lives, the money that might have been utilized in those experiments can be used to improve the welfare of communities in need. Thus, focusing on research that does not need huge investment can be beneficial to some people.
In conclusion, scientists and researchers should not focus narrowly on fields that are most likely to benefit most people since scientific research is unpredictable and scientific fields are interconnected to each other. However, it is true that scientific research may demand considerable amount of finance to conduct experiments, so it might be a better choice to focus on fields that do not encroach the societal welfare. Scientists and researchers should find a balance between these two positions in order to advance scientific fields and, at the same time, yield the largest benefit to people.