EDIT: I just realized that the LTEE and Beal’s experiment are being conducted at the same place, Michigan State University!
I'm accustomed to thinking of Big Science as the LHCs and the Human Genome Project and the Human Brain Projects of the world, but there might be a category of experiments that are instances of Long-Term Science.
.. and how they are financed. Sometimes I wonder what humanity missed because experiments that only yield after more than one generation are rare.
It reminds me of my own adventures making yogurt, each generation carried forward to the next batch. Being able to freeze the samples (for the ecoli, not the yogurt!) is really neat. At anytime they rewind the clock to test an ancestor.
Having recently read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity_economics, the parallels with the things Stephen Jay Gould argued about are fascinating.