This perpetuates the fallacy that all "scientific effort" is in some way fungible, and if you took scientists off one project, you could just put them on another one without any friction or loss of effectiveness.

That makes about as much sense as suggesting you could take me, a PHP developer, off the project I'm on now, throw me onto a team developing embedded OSes for medical devices, and have me just pick right up and be fully productive on day 1.

It also presupposes that as long as there is even one important hard problem out there, we should simply ignore all the less-important problems and throw all our resources at the most important one, which is also both unrealistic and fairly unhelpful.