This is the sort of thing that happens all the time. New technologies are used for purposes that are completely mundane: in this case, identifying the dog responsible for a pile of crap, and thus the owner. But for some reason, science fiction authors and other futurists rarely think of such secondary uses for the science they dream up.
It seems to me that it’s a kind of one-way function, like those used in public-key encryption. Given a technique, there’s no way to see all the potential uses for it, because this reality is just too complex. But given a need, you might see an application of an existing technology that no one else has noticed. I’m sure Marie Curie could have predicted many uses for radiation, but even in her wildest fantasies I doubt she could have predicted that it would be used to power spacecraft at the edge of the solar system.
Maybe not Curie, mostly because SF was in its infancy then as well, but nuclear powered spacecraft are a staple of 1940s and 1950s SF.
Incidentally, nuclear bombs were portrayed in SF a few years before the Manhattan Project was known to the public, someone in a Federal security agency called up one of the authors of such a story and asked him who in the government talked! (He was unaware that the US was researching it apparently.)
Exactly. SF authors needed a scientifically plausible way to advance their stories, and the discovery of radiation gave them one — one that they couldn’t know would work, but that it turned out did.