Universities and funders should start suing these quacks. Like how sponsors sometimes have gone after an athlete busted for doping. Its insane how free scientific fraud is to do.
Universities run a lot of even basic functions on grant money (university takes a cut in money and/or labor) and researchers and labs are the ones that apply for the grants.
For most science there is no obvious commercialization at least in any predictable timeframes. When there is, it's typically called R&D.
It would just make them look worse and make people question why they're giving that VC money.
This is the primary critique from the left of the VC phenomenon.
Turns out human meat suits are just driven by biology to survive and not egalitarian human philosophy and psychology
Everyone who I know who has encountered it just switches who their research is based on. Then doesn't go get smacked down. Quite risky to do so.
but well... people gets what they asked for, so everybody should be happy with the current situation.
If cheaters have the money it means also that somebody has zero money. Is a double loss. This people simply pass over the other researchers and push them out of the road.
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'A 2012 research paper found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies.[79] In late 2021, The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology examined 53 top papers about cancer published between 2010 and 2012 and showed that among studies that provided sufficient information to be redone, the effect sizes were 85% smaller on average than the original findings.[80][81] Another report estimated that almost half of randomized controlled trials contained flawed data (based on the analysis of anonymized individual participant data (IPD) from more than 150 trials).[83]
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There's also a simple pragmatic issue. When finding something is effective gives you billions of dollars in profits, and finding it ineffective gives you millions in losses, you have motivations beyond just the truth. This is where regulatory agencies are supposed to come into play, yet those agencies tend to be staffed (if not lead) by people from the exact same companies they're supposed to be regulating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
Admin people like the principal may get obscene salaries (like 4 times the max professor salary) though.
As an academic, I think academics (including me) are paid too much. We need people who are interested in the science, not those who (pretend to) do it for money.
In the US, the problem is mostly the opposite. Lots of people would rather do science, but it's hard to choose using your skills for real science when some company will pay you 2x-10x to instead optimize ad clicks on their website or algorithmic trading or whatever.
In some of the humanities, liberal arts, social sciences etc academia may pay better than other options for those people. But for most STEM folks, it's a tradeoff between "low-paid meaningful work" vs "high-paid meaningless work".
Medicine and AI research may be the only two areas where people can simultaneously do cutting edge research and make high salaries.
It's really easy to do "shortcuts" in academia that gets one better salary if that's what they want. As seen in this post.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/university-of-cal...
Offtopic: At least for an european it's totally absurd that the top 10 or so on that list are sports coaches.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2022/university-o...
Commercial sponsors maybe benefitted from the positive results and don't want to risk losing future such benefits by biting the hands that feed them…
NIH and other funders would be the ones that would like their money back (although they don't probably care either).