As someone who vehemently advocates basic research (especially over the usual checking if the treatment group is different from the control group, etc), I find

As someone who vehemently advocates basic research (especially over the usual checking if the treatment group is different from the control group, etc), I find this article to be very weak support. What is supposed to be the actual success here? 1) The most basic questions remain to be answered about this topic: >"Her research has been crucial—not only the initial characterization, but also her understanding of the systematics and classification of chytrids, which helped provide a conceptual scaffold for questions about Bd: Where did it come from? What made it so strange and so terrible? Why does it affect some species differently than others? Those questions haven’t yet been conclusively answered, but it’s fair to say Longcore has played a major part in our current understanding and whatever progress might yet be made." 2) The related problems have been getting worse, not better, since this research was done: >"Chytrid was only the first in a series of horrible fungal disease outbreaks—white nose syndrome in bats, snake fungal disease, sudden oak death—that have shaken global ecologies during the last decade. Lessons learned from the chytrid outbreak have been applied to them and will be applied to future outbreaks, of which there will assuredly be more: For some unknown reason, fungal diseases appear to be emerging faster than other types, and they’re becoming more destructive than they historically were."