So there was a somewhat subdued response to the "what science fields are most underfunded", but it got me thinking about a slightly different question, namely:
which science fields could rapidly produce more science results if given a sudden increase in funding?
This is a somewhat non-trivial question, since generating expertise takes time, so does building equipment and collecting data.
There are important fields, which would really have diminshing returns in response to sudden increases in funding - they are already manpower limited, and there is no fungible manpower where people with the required expertise can be summoned with no notice, rather it'd take several years to ramp up and attract in people.
Similarly there are fields where construction of new resources, like major research facilities, just takes a long time, they could make a start with new resources, but the increase in science output would be slow coming. Other fields have facilities and manpower but are constrained by data flow.
You can always do something, of course, buy more toys and give everyone well deserved promotions and pay raises, but that is not quite the same thing.
So, what is there?
In astro, the two fields I can identify are planet detection - the tools now exist, and there is a pool of people interested in doing the work and capable of doing it, but the field is resource limited and has insufficient people to handle the data and modeling. So, a modest increase in funding could both bring in immediate flux of people, and more resources, since existing instruments could literally buy into existing telescopes immediately and increase throughput significantly. This would work both for radial velocity searches and for transit searches.
I think a modest surge in database mining could also be accomplished by direct cash injection; there is definitely more data than can be analyzed out there. The caveat is that it is heterogenous data not optimised for synoptic surveys or data mining, so it'd be a fishing expedition, but those are always fun.
I suspect there are sub-fields in physics, chemistry and mathematics where you could do the same thing, but I don't want to hazard a guess as to which. In bio and geo, I have no idea what fields could surge given more resources; I have no sense of what is resource limited and what is either well funded or choked by extrinsic bottlenecks.
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