A lot of that research is useless. Take biology for example, they might spend 5 million, trying to find out why a certain tree has slightly yellower leafs. Useful for their field? Maybe. But there is really no feasible way for them to monetize it.
He scoffed and laughed and said "Can you believe the stupid stuff people research? All this stuff with absolutely no application..."
I was frankly a little stunned. I was thinking that it could affect crop growth, depending on how you harvest the last crop, how if there was a trauma mechanism there might be a reverse mechanism that could cause revolutions in biological growth, etc. etc. etc. I couldn't believe he didn't see the potential I saw.
Which brings me to my point: saying "...no feasible way for them to monetize it" is, in my opinion, a symptom of lack of imagination. While it's not all monetize-able, I believe with the author that 48B of research represents a goldmine of ideas for someone with the proper eye for opportunity and business acumen.
How many major commercial breakthroughs started off as a "useless" little experiment in a lab somewhere over the last couple of centuries or so?
The road from scientific breakthrough to commercial viability is long and winding. Don't decry something as worthless just because you cannot find an immediate use for it. Who knows, in 60 years time a synthetic derivative of that specific yellowing agent in those leaves might be the cornerstone in some significant commercial product or process.
If you can get deep enough into a field to sense those ideas in the air (and this is much less work than you need to publish original papers yourself), you might find a goldmine.