Funding as the limiting reagent in the reaction of scientific inquiry

I had an intriguing conversation with Anna yesterday evening, about a problem than always has and arguably always will plague scientific research: funding. What Anna basically proposed was to change public perceptions of science to make scientific research more appealing and more interesting to the unwashed masses. In doing so, pressure would then be placed on the government to allocate more funding to research.

This then leads to the question, "But how do you actually get the public more interested in research?" Her answer amounts to a general campaign of exposing people to the wonders of scientific research. Get the public so interested, so conditioned to be interested in scientific research, that attitudes will appropriately change.

My arguement disagrees with this (naturally). I completely agree with Anna's motives and to see a world where people think of science as something to be accepted and respected, instead of the caricature which is so often ridiculed, feared, and marginalized. The ceaseless rhetoric of Creationists notwithstanding, many people just don't understand science, and who could really blame them? Not everyone has the luxury of devoting four years or more to studying population genetics, the mechanics of natural selection, or the application of phylogenetic systematics to historical biogeography. Biologists have for years (if not decades) tried to deduce a model tantamount to the "Universe on a T-Shirt" (to borrow the title from a fascinating popular physics book I saw at a store once) -- a clean, simple, easy phrase which can be easily ingrained into the public consciousness. Would that all of biology could be easily distilled, condensed, and packaged up the way Einstein's immortal E=MC^2 is now (and with that I really have to wonder just how much of a percentage of those who can actually spout off that formula could with equal nonchalance state its meaning and importance -- let alone how one could use such a creature).

And of course, there's the selfish factor -- the plague of Conservation Biology. Why do you want to save Species X? What's in it for me?

Perhaps it is my personal bias, having been raised as a child steeped in critical thought (and that of the most devastating, yet excellent sort -- parental). I have always thought of science in the way that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor stated their famous slogan, even beneath their roaring lion: "Ars gratia artis". Is it really such a foreign concept that scientific inquiry should be a pleasurable experience, in and of itself?