Societal impact of research
You need to think longer term. Decades, and perhaps centuries. Research done today may seem to have little immediate impact, and that is true. But over time, it contributes to the general knowledge that makes things possible. Think of any scientist from the past whose name is known today, even, say, Euclid. Some of what they did may have had some immediate effect, but much of it laid the groundwork for later advances.
In pure mathematics and theoretical physics, for example, an interesting question today may be vital in the future. Isaac Newton's calculus work was so unimportant that he put it in a drawer for years. Leibniz did &quot;interesting&quot; things in understanding real functions, but without their work, and what came after, much of engineering in the past 150 or so years would be impossible.
Think Mendel or Darwin. They studied and thought because certain questions were &quot;interesting&quot; to them. They laid the foundation of modern understanding and that led to &quot;useful&quot; things.
Note that Einstein's work took years to be accepted because the &quot;great minds&quot; of the day were focused on a different theory that turned out to have no basis - the aether.
Moreover, many of the advances of the &quot;great minds&quot; of science were only possible because of a general advancement in understanding, much of which was contributed by those whose names we no longer remember. The current state of understanding the world can be thought of as an advancing front with many contributors, some of whose contributions we remember specifically, but it is the front itself that makes them possible. All of us push against that frontier in our small, perhaps, ways.