> care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be. That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.

That's pretty much my experience from 20+ years ago.

One thing that I didn't appreciate when I left the ivory tower was the extent of the replication "crisis."

If other academics can't replicate your work in some esoteric corner of bio research, it's no big deal--some people get burned wasting time, but the research just atrophies in the end.

But in the biotech / pharma industry, we in-licensed a lot of un-replicatable garbage from academia.

And replication was important to us because we actually had to make a drug that was effective (which loosely translates to ... "clinicians must be able to replicate your drug's efficacy.").*

* I'm not sure how true this is anymore, given politicization of regulatory bodies, but it was an eye-opener to me years ago.