As scientists-to-be is our primary responsibility to ourselves, to our bosses/departments, or to science itself?

I'm not even sure what this phrase means. IMHO, the only principles are

1. Do what you find interesting and try to get good of it.

2. Never publish junk (BTW, no medical research that works is junk: even if the disease is rare and affects only few "old people" and you found a cure, you improved this world quite a bit; the junk is something that either doesn't work or is perfectly clear from what everybody knows already and I should say that many papers involving "hot techniques" fall into that category).

3. Watch out a bit so that your can live and support yourself and your family on your salary (but don't try to fight for promotion, etc. beyond that level).

4. Never tell other people that what they are doing is not worth doing unless you can easily do it yourself and never listen to anybody telling you something like that unless he can demonstrate that he can do it himself better and faster than you.

5. Don't envy anybody. There is always a bigger fish in the pond (a lot of them, really).

As to "losing belief in academia as something useful to the world", since the linked letter uses quite a strong language, I'll use equally strong one to answer. It is not greedy and irresponsible academicians that make the beautiful world worse but the rather disgusting world that makes academicians greedy and irresponsible. We work for God but have to deal with people and I can quite understand the attitude of Wernher von Braun, which, if I understand anything about him, was "I'm here to get us all to the Moon and my time is short, so if you make it impossible without killing Jews, it is your moral problem and not mine". Whether you want to share this attitude or to protest against it most fervently is your choice. The point is that this is not a choice a scientist invented and forced upon the world but the choice the world invented and forced upon a scientist. So, I don't buy the rhetoric about scientist's responsibility to the humankind unless I see some reciprocity. Making the most brilliant rocket engineer of all times a Nazi is quite an unforgivable crime and it is not the only one the academia can charge the humankind with. So, if somebody insists that we are not up to expectations, I'll retort that the world should be grateful that the scientists still work for it at all, not judge them from the viewpoint of idealistic moral standards or their utility for its purposes.

As scientists-to-be is our primary responsibility to ourselves, to our bosses/departments, or to science itself?

I'm not even sure what this phrase means. IMHO, the only principles are

1. Do what you find interesting and try to get good of it.

2. Never publish junk (BTW, no medical research that works is junk: even if the disease is rare and affects only few "old people" and you found a cure, you improved this world quite a bit; the junk is something that either doesn't work or is perfectly clear from what everybody knows already and I should say that many papers involving "hot techniques" fall into that category).

3. Watch out a bit so that your can live and support yourself and your family on your salary (but don't try to fight for promotion, etc. beyond that level).

4. Never tell other people that what they are doing is not worth doing unless you can easily do it yourself and never listen to anybody telling you something like that unless he can demonstrate that he can do it himself better and faster than you.

5. Don't envy anybody. There is always a bigger fish in the pond (a lot of them, really).

As to "losing belief in academia as something useful to the world", since the linked letter uses quite a strong language, I'll use equally strong one to answer. It is not greedy and irresponsible academicians that make the beautiful world worse but the rather disgusting world that makes academicians greedy and irresponsible. We work for God but have to deal with people and I can quite understand the attitude of Wernher von Braun, which, if I understand anything about him, was "I'm here to get us all to the Moon and my time is short, so if you make it impossible without sending people to gas chambers, it is your moral problem and not mine". Whether you want to share this attitude or to protest against it most fervently is your choice. The point is that this is not a choice a scientist invented and forced upon the world but the choice the world invented and forced upon a scientist. So, I don't buy the rhetoric about scientist's responsibility to the humankind unless I see some reciprocity. Making the most brilliant rocket engineer of all times a Nazi is quite an unforgivable crime and it is not the only one the academia can charge the humankind with. So, if somebody insists that we are not up to expectations, I'll retort that the world should be grateful that the scientists still work for it at all, not judge them from the viewpoint of idealistic moral standards or their utility for its purposes.