If in a sci-fi novel an alien handed a character their 'magic rock' (iPhone) and they smelted it for its gold content rather than reverse-engineered it's wireless charging, communication, and computation capabilities you would scream at the character for being horribly short-sighted. Such a waste of sophisticated technology laid right in front of them for such little temporary gain.
check out the HHGG books
Flashbacks to that "Can a protein originally found in jellyfish improve your memory? Our scientists say yes!" commercial I've heard a million times without even setting out to watch TV. I was skeptical at the time, but I guess this means such a thing is at least in the realm of theoretically possible.
Edit: turns out that specific thing was still illegitimate anyway.
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/jellyfish-memory-s...
Even endowment for the arts can produce significant impact on how we think and use technology.
As we know well from experience and might expect, just understand is nearly necessary for a huge fraction of fantastic progress and often sufficient or nearly so. The track record is the best of any allocation of resources.
Or toss some rocks into the camp fire and in the morning find some clump at the bottom. Then, try to UNDERSTAND that? That clump is different; what the heck is it? This was the first time saw this; what caused it? Can do that again?
Okay, just used the carbon in the fire to remove the oxygen from copper oxide and leave some copper metal. Start of exploitation of metals for humans ....
The CRISPR system here was discovered in a single-celled organism that likes brine water - a tool it used to intercept hijackers. The 'standard' Cas9 that is being used extensively in the rest of the CRIPSR stories comes from the bacteria that causes strep throat. Studies are now mining the genomes of organisms found in 'mud pits' and 'pond scum' to find all sorts of smaller, faster, more efficient variants of Cas9. And that's just for the single purpose of editing a genome.
The capabilities of proteins found (off the top of my head) in jellyfish, in sulfur springs, in colored algae, in electric eels, in little pond creatures, in HIV, in waterbears, etc. are all depositing huge amounts of technology into our collective knowledgebank. We have been given a store of 'alien' technologies to sift through that are applicable in every condition to be found on Earth, literally. The cures to many of our ills will not be engineered from scratch, but rather will be adapted from existing technologies found in extant organisms literally scattered across the globe. This is how 'basic science' works. A magnanimous scientist is curious how a little cell can survive in really salty water, and owing to his curiosity we discover a nanotechnology that can edit an organism's genome. We humans are smart - but not yet that smart.
(some of those protein technologies we like to talk about here on HN: https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/ )