Actually, my uninformed guess (from casual familiarity and friendship with people from various fields) is that physics and chemistry are cheaper than biology to conduct. There’s expensive equipment in Phys/Chem but it can be re-used over and over again by multiple labs. Biology on the other hand has major recurring costs in the form of maintaining animal populations and greater degree to which replication is important. And then things get cheaper again in the psych/social sciences, where experiments are often either computerized or conducted by undergraduates for credit and conducted on volunteers.
Basically, if you graph xkcd!purity by price, I think it is bell shaped with Biology at the peak. In an absolute “per researcher, per experiment” sense. That’s not to say that biology might not be “cheaper” in terms of return on investment from an EA standpoint.
Actually, my uninformed guess (from casual familiarity and friendship with people from various fields) is that physics and chemistry are cheaper than biology to conduct. There’s expensive equipment in Phys/Chem but it can be re-used over and over again by multiple labs. Biology on the other hand has major recurring costs in the form of maintaining animal populations and greater degree to which replication is important. And then things get cheaper again in the psych/social sciences, where experiments are often either computerized or conducted by undergraduates for credit and conducted on volunteers.
Basically, if you graph xkcd!purity by price, I think it is bell shaped with Biology at the peak. In an absolute “per researcher, per experiment” sense. That’s not to say that biology might not be “cheaper” in terms of return on investment from an EA standpoint.