In the past decade, several international efforts developed to address urgent societal issues have been identified through, for example, the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its associated 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030). These worthy efforts will bring ocean science research to bear on problems that need attention in the short term. Yet, there is also a continuing need at the international level to support fundamental ocean science and solve methodological issues over the long term. While knowledge needs to be created before it can be applied, national and international science strategy documents often do not mention the need to maintain the health of the basic science enterprise. We argue that international organizations designed to create knowledge must be maintained and strengthened to inform decisions on how to allocate funding for generating knowledge about the ocean versus solving ocean problems. We use the ocean iron cycle as an example of the benefits of using such a “bottom-up” approach to knowledge generation.