So, yes, the research cost probably shouldn't reset to 1. But on the other hand, level 61 will take you 18014398509481984000 science cycles. If you're consuming a million science per minute (about 370 blue belts of each science pack), and you're putting Bob's god modules in your beacons, to give your labs +18200% productivity, this is a little shy of 200 thousand years.
It's a 64-bit unsigned overflow, but since you aren't actually going to run into it for at least a couple millennia, I would guess it's not worth fixing.