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There are at present, at rough estimate, ca. 6000 taxonomists at work worldwide on all organisms combined. That is a tiny slice of the biological community as a whole, and their discipline remains one of the weakest and most underfunded (Wilson 2002). From my own museum experience, I believe that twice this number, with several technical assistants each and the aforementioned new technologies, could move the global biodiversity survey to near completion within a single human generation.
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Edward O. Wilson (2004) studied this question.
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