R&D can be done without profit motive. Most R is done in universities without profit motive.
Some argue that nothing gets done if somebody doesn't get capital gains for it. This is of course empirically flat out false.
Some argue that nothing gets done if somebody doesn't get capital gains for it. This is of course empirically flat out false.
When the world beat Germany (twice), part of the reparations for the world wars was basically invalidating most of Germany's intellectual property. The second world war we went above that and basically claimed human beings who were working on that intellectual property.
When America was struggling to get useful radar to work, the British brought us the cavity magnetron, and the US was able to utterly industrialize that into a million allied radar systems. When the US thought jet engines were a dead end fuel hungry fad, the Brits showed us theirs, which was way more advanced and helped the US get on the right track for future development.
When everyone was basically inventing computers as a real thing, the allies benefited greatly from massive cross-pollination, including people who are now considered grandfathers of modern computing literally meeting in a train station and chatting about the computers they were building which helped them work together to build bigger and better machines.
You don't advance innovation and invention by limiting an idea to the six people working R&D on this specific concept in GE, you advance innovation by letting every smart person and their friend dick around with the concept in freedom.
The entirety of the modern internet is basically built on this fact, and moved so damn fast, yet people will STILL insist "no, to encourage innovation you have to not let people innovate!"
How much did Tim Berners-Lee make off of HTTP?
(Very) few do get rich by leeching publicly funded research for spin-off companies. High level admins can get relatively rich from obscene salaries, but they aren't the ones applying for the grants or doing the research.
Probably not altruistic, but not usually primarily for money either. If money is what you want, university is a very bad place for trying to get it. People do do things for other reasons than economic gain regardless of what the prevailing economics dogma and ideology claims.
Of course grants are an economic incentive to do something. But not all economic incentives are profit.
Edit: To be clear, universities as such don't generally apply for research grants. Researchers in universities do, and for getting a grant they get the luxury of working for a salary for a few years, or getting somebody else to be paid for their work. Universities do take a cut (overheads) from the grants to nominally pay for infra and admin etc, but in reality a lot of it is spent on all kinds of non-related things like teaching and alumni dinners and chauffeurs for the provost.
You really can't imagine that decoupling the profit motive from drug research is possible?
Not if it goes through the traditional grant process. I've fundamentally soured on that.
Maybe an open bounty system? First one to develop an effective drug for X gets their costs paid for + 1 billion or something (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to adjust)
But even that would be better than the current system where people that have nothing to do with the research get obscene amounts of money solely on the merit of having obscene amounts of money.
Research funding is allocated mostly by the academic community itself, via panels consisting of academics. This does have problems of its own, but they have little to do with politics as in elected politicians. Policians can have some influence on general directions, but it's quite limited.
What you say sounds very much based on the general anti-government and anti-democratic ideology rather than evaluation of history.
The large increase in non-traditional funding orgs for biomedical research over the last several decades has been driven by a widespread perception that the traditional government funding has been increasingly captured by a academic cliques with low ROI priorities.
I've worked in government science orgs, the capture of funding control by ideological academic cliques is very common. It has unfortunately infested the biomedical research funding, which reduces realized ROI from the money allocated to those orgs. In the US government, some of the best medical R&D ROI dollar-for-dollar right now is found in the military, but that really shouldn't be their job outside of traditional areas like trauma medicine.
It's the snake that eats itself.