On the definition of research - are 'what' and 'how' questions also considered as research?
In biology, what questions are extremely popular, even though they can be largely descriptive. The point is, that knowing descriptive details of a system is the first step in understanding how it works, and can often raise many interesting hypotheses. In fact, this trend of questions is increasing as high-throughput experimental methods are used to collect more and more data (which by itself is only descriptive).

Some famous examples of such what questions are "what is the structure of DNA?" and "what is the sequence of the human genome?".