That's a good question, but in this context, seeing a variety of novel discoveries in the last few years indicates a somewhat successful field.
No, seeing a bunch of novel true discoveries indicates a successful field. However, it's normally hard to independently verify the truth of novel discoveries except in cases where those discoveries have applications.
This seems like a nitpick more than a serious remark: obviously one is talking about the true discoveries, and giving major examples of them in biology is not at all difficult. The discovery of RNA interference is in the biochem end of things, while a great number of discoveries have occurred in paleontology as well as using genetics to trace population migrations (both humans and non-humans).
it's normally hard to independently verify the truth of novel discoveries except in cases where those discoveries have applications.
So one question here is, for ...
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)