>I've also seen, repeatedly, that most biologists (both wet-lab and computational) will just waste more money rather than using it to scale up productivity.
While I agree to an extent, it's not necessarily possible to 'scale up'. I helped run a project off around $40,000 of grant money. Our goals were research and education. About half went to pay my coworker and I about $15/h, another large chunk went to gas. The rest went to equipment and stuff. We couldn't charge for anything, we had no product to sell. We made brochures and buttons we gave out by donation, our work was in no way marketable. We had to justify everything we did by proving the value of the animals we were studying to agriculture.
There's a ton of scientific research that isn't directly valuable in the short term. Especially when it comes to biology. As it is, much of the work is just gathering data because we have painfully limited knowledge of our ecosystems. But the more we learn, the more we understand how important they are for the long term functioning of the planet.
It's exceedingly difficult convince a logging company or an oil company, the government they bribe, or the public in general that caring about the long term gains of researching these things should come before the short term gains of exploiting them. At least in my experience.
While I agree to an extent, it's not necessarily possible to 'scale up'. I helped run a project off around $40,000 of grant money. Our goals were research and education. About half went to pay my coworker and I about $15/h, another large chunk went to gas. The rest went to equipment and stuff. We couldn't charge for anything, we had no product to sell. We made brochures and buttons we gave out by donation, our work was in no way marketable. We had to justify everything we did by proving the value of the animals we were studying to agriculture.
There's a ton of scientific research that isn't directly valuable in the short term. Especially when it comes to biology. As it is, much of the work is just gathering data because we have painfully limited knowledge of our ecosystems. But the more we learn, the more we understand how important they are for the long term functioning of the planet.
It's exceedingly difficult convince a logging company or an oil company, the government they bribe, or the public in general that caring about the long term gains of researching these things should come before the short term gains of exploiting them. At least in my experience.