Nice post! Agreed that hard problems (or at least those that are likely to take more than the usual academic funding cycle to produce results) are likely to be relatively neglected.
It would also be good to consider that interdisciplinary research tends to be hard to fund but often produces outsized results (tool development for basic biology often falls into this category). So some of the hard problems could be more tractable to an interdisciplinary group, but getting funding for one is often impractical. I don’t know enough about the priority areas you identify as neglected and important to know which might benefit from an such approach, but specifically allocating some funding for interdisciplinary work could might produce good results in these areas.
Nice post! Agreed that hard problems (or at least those that are likely to take more than the usual academic funding cycle to produce results) are likely to be relatively neglected.
It would also be good to consider that interdisciplinary research tends to be hard to fund but often produces outsized results (tool development for basic biology often falls into this category). So some of the hard problems could be more tractable to an interdisciplinary group, but getting funding for one is often impractical. I don’t know enough about the priority areas you identify as neglected and important to know which might benefit from an such approach, but specifically allocating some funding for interdisciplinary work could might produce good results in these areas.