Twenty-five years after we found the gene, and "there's currently no cure for Huntington's disease or any way to stop it getting worse."
1. Biology is hard, unimaginably harder than writing a piece of software, for example.
2. The way research is funded is horribly inefficient and in serious need of an overhaul. I'm all for pouring more money into research, but too much research takes place in bloated universities and too little money trickles down to the scientist doing the actual work.
As a brief summary, I think keeping research groups small and most funding internal does solve lots of problems. I think you want to avoid at all costs having a principal investigator that publishes 50 papers per year and supervises 20 students simultaneously. Which means he is actually doing none of these things. Just stamping his signature everywhere, and doing a bit of politics to raise funds.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute conducted a long investigation on how to do good research prior to starting Janelia Campus. They looked into very successful institutions (AT&T Labs, LMB, CSHL, etc) and drew some equivalent conclusions to what I stated above [1].
[1] https://www.janelia.org/sites/default/files/About%20Us/JFRC....