Thanks-I found this quite useful. But I think in order to evaluate the claim that life sciences are not slowing down, it would be good to have some long time series. I think it would be productive to engage with the research that is looking at productivity per researcher. This may be difficult to quantify fairly, because individual papers may have gotten less impactful. For instance, people have claimed that since per capita GDP has grown more slowly in recent decades in developed countries and yet we have many more people doing research, that the productivity per researcher is much lower now. But if you look at specific capabilities, like genomes sequenced, you would say that the productivity per person has gotten much higher because of the strong exponential growth.
Thanks-I found this quite useful. But I think in order to evaluate the claim that life sciences are not slowing down, it would be good to have some long time series. I think it would be productive to engage with the research that is looking at productivity per researcher. This may be difficult to quantify fairly, because individual papers may have gotten less impactful. For instance, people have claimed that since per capita GDP has grown more slowly in recent decades in developed countries and yet we have many more people doing research, that the productivity per researcher is much lower now. But if you look at specific capabilities, like genomes sequenced, you would say that the productivity per person has gotten much higher because of the strong exponential growth.