
How “Useless” Science Unraveled an Amphibian Disease - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/how-useless-science-unraveled-an-amphibian-apocalypse
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nonbel
As someone who vehemently advocates basic research (especially over the usual
checking if the treatment group is different from the control group, etc), I
find this article to be very weak support. What is supposed to be the actual
success here?

1) The most basic questions remain to be answered about this topic:

>"Her research has been crucial—not only the initial characterization, but
also her understanding of the systematics and classification of chytrids,
which helped provide a conceptual scaffold for questions about Bd: Where did
it come from? What made it so strange and so terrible? Why does it affect some
species differently than others?

Those questions haven’t yet been conclusively answered, but it’s fair to say
Longcore has played a major part in our current understanding and whatever
progress might yet be made."

2) The related problems have been getting worse, not better, since this
research was done:

>"Chytrid was only the first in a series of horrible fungal disease
outbreaks—white nose syndrome in bats, snake fungal disease, sudden oak
death—that have shaken global ecologies during the last decade. Lessons
learned from the chytrid outbreak have been applied to them and will be
applied to future outbreaks, of which there will assuredly be more: For some
unknown reason, fungal diseases appear to be emerging faster than other types,
and they’re becoming more destructive than they historically were."

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smallnamespace
> As someone who vehemently advocates basic research

> The related problems have been getting worse, not better, since this
> research was done

The most pertinent definition of 'basic' research is that there is no
immediate payoff to the research that you can foresee -- otherwise, it would
be applied research.

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nonbel
Yes, but the premise of this article is that it describes a situation in which
that payoff is visible. I don't see any visible payoff at that link. If I
tried to use it to argue for basic research, I would expect skeptics to
propose the possibility that applying the "lessons learned" has lead to more
problems. It says that for "some unknown reason" things are getting worse
after applying those lessons...

