Why not ? ? ?
If you can get the money, the laboratory to use, the experimental
equipment, and the people you need to work on it with you, then
curiosity is a fine, honorable, and perfectly good reason to go ahead,
do what you gotta do, follow your heart, satisfy your curiosity, and learn
new stuff.
Neither the Large Hadron Collider, nor the Mars Rover, nor the Hubble
Space Telescope, nor the New Horizons probe, was built to cure cancer.