Technology

There's a tricky balance.

For every endeavor that could recoup its costs in a fairly reasonable way, there are several other attempts that end in failure.

If you know that best case your project can be modestly better than break even, but it will most likely completely fail, would you invest in it?

I could respect an argument for outright socializing pharmaceutical efforts and rolling the needs into taxes and cutting out the capitalist angle entirely, but so long as you rely on capitalist funding model in any significant amount, then you have to allow for some incentive. When the research is pretty much fully funded by public funds, that funding should come with strings attached, but here it seems the lead up was largely in capitalist territory.