Solvation Energy

This frustrates me a lot. 

It's from an old post of Ashutosh Jogalekar at Curious Wavefunction. He's is talking about what we need to be able to design drugs rationally i.e., using computers. The key quote is:

The basic science is also going to involve the accurate experimental determination of solvation energies. Such measurements are typically considered too mundane and basic to be funded. And yet, as the authors make clear in the paragraph quoted at the beginning, it's only such measurements that are going to aid the calculation of aqueous solvation energies. And these calculations are going to be ultimately key to calculating drug-protein interactions. After all, if you cannot even get the solvation energy right...

Once you start learning about chemical modelling you realise how incredibly important it is to be able to calculate the interaction of molecules in water. A vast amount of amazingly important chemistry happens in water. Including all of life. If you can't understand the interaction of molecules in water properly then you have no chance of understanding biology comprehensively. The second thing you realise is that we have no idea how to do this. When you look at the simplest possible cases, a sodium ion interacting with a chloride ion in water. We have no models that can satisfactorily reproduce this interaction.

So the logical next step is to direct a vast amount of effort into understanding this problem. This lack of understanding should be like a sputnik moment. It is criminal we have no idea how the simplest possible case of something so incredibly important works.

Instead you hear things quite frequently, like there is no funding in this kind of totally fundamental research. You have to tie your grant proposals to direct applications to get funding. But the exact point of government funded research is to build this fundamental science, which doesn't have direct applications but may one day. How does the LHC get funded to discover something of no practical importance? When there are problems that are so fundamentally crucial and so neglected.

Instead you have vast amounts of money thrown at biomedical research trying to discover new drugs and understand biology when the fundamental underlying mechanisms aren't fully understood. It costs billions to develop a drug, normally by an incredibly tedious and costly experimental trial and error. This is analogous to trying to land a man on the moon, without Newton's theory of gravity, or without programs that can predict orbits. You might eventually hit the moon by trial and error or extrapolating from past patterns. But a lot of people are going to die in the process. 

I would really love to continue working on this problem and ones like it. Both because of how interesting they are and because I know how important they are. And it is so disheartening to hear that I may not be able to. It would be OK however, if it were because there are too many competent and smart people who will do a better job than me. I would happily find a different career if I knew this problem were in good hands. But instead the reason I can't work on this problem is that there's not enough funding. That is so infuriating, especially considering the costs of theoretical work are so cheap. Just an academic salary and some computing power, are all you need. As well as the fact that vast amounts of money is poured down the drain doing experiments that would become redundant if we had good theoretical models of molecular interactions in water.