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Wasn't planning on going to the march for science, but now I'm rethinking that.

Alzheimer, cancer, MRSA, etc are equal opportunity killers. And god only knows how much basic research has been turned into startups and pharma products.

Thank God we have such a competent private sector.

and it requires big daddy gubmint to fund & manage all that research?  LOL

Actually, yes. If the NIH didn't fund basic research, many, if not most of the new pharma innovations would not exist. R&D on drugs is already incredibly expensive; and that research is only the directly translational aspects of biomedical research. Translational research builds off of decades of high risk/low reward basic research that very few pharma/private companies will ever want exposure to.

Well, I doubt anyone really wanted to figure out how dementia worked anyway. They'd just forget.

 the the milk from all the little welfare tits needs to dry up.   everyone's favorite little government program is probably going to take a hit. We can't afford it anymore.

But we can afford a $54B increase to DoD spending? How many Americans have Jihadis killed in the last decade, vs how many has cancer alone killed last year?

I defer to your wisdom, Bernie.  It's a shame the Democrats stole the nomination from you.

What are you talking about? NIH/Biomedical research has enjoyed bipartisan support for years. The last big budget increase was under Bush, and the Republican controlled congress voted to increase the NIH budget just last year...

Our national debt is bipartisan, too.

You're talking in circles here; you seem ok with increased DoD/DHS spending in the tens of billions range, but then you talk about the national debt. Which is it?

Are you claiming I can't be against both?

Your claims about how important this only means that companies are getting a free ride on research paid by taxpayers.  Let them absorb that cost.  The market will adjust.

You're no different than farmers arguing for their subsidies and welfare moms wanting their EBT cards. Just another flavor of the FSA with their hand in taxpayer pockets.

welfare queens of all types get loud when their free money gets threatened.

And then let the company have the patents and charge 1000% markups claiming it's due to the cost of ''research'' even if much of it is funded by the taxpayer.

Fund it but place a strict limit on the profit margin and cut the patent time by 50%. I'd bet private companies would suddenly find the money to fund research themselves.

If you get government out of the issue up front, you won't need to start imposing profit margins and you won't have fiscal sucking chest wound. 

Exactly, what companies want is free money along with the rights to keep all the profits using taxpayer dollars. Take that away and see if companies are so eager to get a govt handout or will they magically decide that they now have the coin to do their own research.

There are certainly pharma companies that do their own basic research: P&G, Lilly, Genentech, etc. But that body of work is rarely published, and doesn't help build the community of knowledge.
Basic research that gets commercialized oftentimes takes the form of startups that draw in venture capital. The net growth to the economy from these things is actually pretty good.

In almost every field there are many things that are never published.

They are called 'trade secrets' a dn protected from exposure to anyone that does not actually need the information.

And this does not even get into the protection of patent information by 'secrecy orders.'

I had three patents issued from DOD EW research.

Each was locked behind a secrecy order.

They mostly dealt with synchronization between signals and digital clocks aligned to them, or the brute force synchronization between oscillators to incredible accuracy.

Since we could not 'market' the patents for commercial use we received DOD contracts to teach others how to use the methods.

Yes and no.

Basic research in chemistry and physics  gets managed.

Often by the subsidy of a PhD student.   You get grant money to design, develop, and execute your experiment.

I now a physics PhD that was granted for a better measurement of the 'size' of subatomic particles.  

The precision was improved by a couple orders of magnitude since that payed into a lot of other things.

Like superconductivity.

DOE funded research.



Discovering new drugs not so much.

Evil 'Big Pharma' spends their money searching for the source of the next great antibiotic.

Mount a Rain Forest expedition to collect samples of plants.

Or grab some dirt from the ground and see what grows out.



Or exploiting the discovery (Nobel Prize awarded for mechanism and details) that mammals use NO in the body as a control and signalling agent.

Once that was shown we ended up with Viagra to alter the rate of NO breakdown in the body. It slows it down so the NO you naturally make sticks around longer.

Better erections.  

We already knew NO levels had something to do with erections.  Thus the use of  'poppers' in sex play.