After All, Tang Started as a Nonprofit Project, Too

Go ahead and sneer at last week’s news that researchers may have discovered the function of the appendix. Laugh at the thought that anyone cares. It’s a seemingly useless organ, after all, and the search to ascertain what it does in the human body, while a possibly interesting topic only should your next cocktail party turn deathly boring, seems like one of those who-cares quests, a typically irrelevant tilting at windmills by taxpayer-funded scientists with nothing better to do.

Well, not quite. Research such as the appendix study may sit squarely in the nonprofit world, but its results typically reverberate throughout commercial concerns for years to come. Pharmaceutical companies use the information to develop new treatments. Marketing companies help Big Pharma sell those treatments to America. Medical technology companies come up with new diagnostic tools. And so on and so on.

This isn’t to say that last week’s paper will generate profits to whatever companies manage to capitalize on the findings. Just don’t be so quick to dismiss such efforts as cute trifles that have no effect on your portfolio. | 501(c)