Well, you've gotta have tool and method development as at least a fraction of research. He might not have answered any scientific questions, but I also contribute to the development of software for other scientists and I can certainly point to plenty of examples of its worth, both in improving performance and feature set. If anything, not enough effort is put to that category of research. Molecular dynamic simulations can take days to run, but most computational biologists in that field care more about proving the correctness of their results than optimizing performance.I have my own personal tale of working in the same institute with someone who made some very pretty pictures by analyzing massive sets of protein sequences, and using grid computing environments to handle the numbers-crunching.