It's amazing how much science just gets no funding to speak of. There are maybe half a dozen museums in the world whose palaeontology departments are not in a permanent budget crunch. There is no money to fund digs, to find new fossils. There is, critically, no money to prepare fossils out of the rocks. One very major natural history known to me had only a single preparator on staff: and the last I heard, that one preparator had been let go so that no fossil preparation at all was taking place, at least officially. And of course there is no money to fund actual research into the fossils that should be coming out of those rocks -- for example, dinosaurs, which you'd think would be a big win for any ambitious museum.
The part of this that baffles me is that there always seem to be untold billions to build particle accelerators. Spread the wealth, high-energy physicists!
It's sad to think about how little of our resources are dedicated to work like this. Although I enjoyed the Marvel movies growing up, it would be nice if similar funding could be found for a project like the author describes (and, of course, you could have a sort of documentary showing people what they discovered).
Is it? How would anyone make money or fame out of it?
The way our scientific establishment works now is that you are rewarded for discovering things which fit into and shed new light on our existing web of understanding, not for things which are completely new and unconnected. I don't think this is entirely bad - science is useful because it's a densely connected web rather than a bag of unrelated facts. But it does mean that very little value is attached to observations of weird new things that don't fit in anywhere.
Back when I was a scientist, I was studying a known structure in the cytoskeleton. By chance, some of the cells I prepared went funny, and produced a radically different structure that I hadn't seen before, and couldn't find any mention of in the literature. I showed my supervisor, who basically said "so what?". On their own, this new structure was useless to a career scientist, because you can't say anything about what it is, what it does, why it's important, or how it connects to what anyone else is publishing about.
(It turned out this structure had been seen before, and published a few times, but still, nobody really knows what it's all about)
> But it does mean that very little value is attached to observations of weird new things that don't fit in anywhere.
This surprises me (as a non-scientist). As the observation is clearly real and clearly fits in somewhere to the web (the human body works after all), so it is just not valuable because it cannot easily be published without additional work?
> because you can't say anything about what it is, what it does, why it's important, or how it connects to what anyone else is publishing about.
I guess I am mostly surprised that "it exists" is insufficient. Or that the discovery of this new thing wouldn't trigger further investigation rather than "so what?"
Basically, nobody has the job of discovering human anatomy except as a side hustle or byproduct.
I’m quite surprised at that. That’s a remarkable area to not have full time researchers in.