Why pour billions into searching for a black hole and reaching distant stars when worthier causes exist at home?

You know how we care passionately about pandas, elephants and dolphins – “charismatic animals” – but care little about hyenas, mudskippers or tapeworms that uncharismatically ensure the balance of our natural world? Environmentalists have complained about this bias, at the expense of the mean and ugly biomass that indispensably makes up most of our world.

I recall Atul Gawande, the surgeon, author and adviser to Bill Clinton, complaining about “charismatic medicine”: how every intern wants to be a brain or heart surgeon, rather than deal with mental health or treatment of the elderly.

This week, my hackles were raised by “charismatic science”, triggered by the excitement over “photographs” of a black hole in the M87 galaxy, 54 million light years away. Then there is China’s plan to build a US$4.3 billion Circular Electron Positron Collider, a successor to Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider, to generate masses of Higgs boson particles. There was also the comparatively modest flurry of enthusiasm here in Hong Kong over the University of Hong Kong’s quest to launch a lobster eye X-ray telescope into space to hunt for dark matter in nearby galaxies.

Our fascination with “charismatic science” comes at the expense of much other urgent science. It discomforts me, for example, that Nasa’s Space Shuttle Programme extracted US$196 billion from the US taxpayer over 30 years and 135 space missions, with the International Space Station costing US$160 billion and the Apollo Space Programme a further US$25.4 billion. Meanwhile, America’s roads have fallen to ruin and US$3 billion a year worldwide could reduce malnutrition in the developing world by 36 per cent, perhaps saving 100 million children from starvation.