Comment by a-dub

the manhattan project was a wartime effort, it is not comparable. moreover, if you read feynman's memoirs, it seems there were certainly a lot of people indulging their intellectual interests under the banner of los alamos. (feynman himself, for example, discovered a fondness for tinkering with computers- and he was a physicist)

i've also been told that bell labs strength comes from the opposite of what you speak. from a culture of intellectual freedom. from a culture of "no committees." they hired the smartest people they could, let them work on what they wanted to, made sure they had every resource they needed, engaged socratically on project progress and otherwise stayed out of the way.

in terms of people using their own tools? that's specialization. if someone spends a lot of years on something, that's what they become an expert in, they will try and apply it and that's what they should do.

while i certainly believe that science can and should answer the calls of society to make the world a better place. it seems that time and time again this happens through the magic of basic research where scientists pursue their interests without regard to this ultimately producing discoveries that are sometimes combined and then give rise to practical and translational applications.