I also disagree. Nobody documents or publicizes the small labs doing small "useless" stuff. The kind of stuff that seems irrelevant but that slowly piles into a mountain of new information. As a PHD myself, many times I thought to myself: "this research is quite insignificant" and what we found was truly small potatoes, but I can only hope that, in the aggregate, all of us that did small stuff during that period advanced science in significant ways.