| mrstickball said: NIH still represents only 30% of the total funding spent in medical research. A far cry from 'most', jjseth. NIH advises $30.5 billion in funding for medical research: http://www.nih.gov/about/budget.htm Medical funding as of 2005: ($95b) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/20/health/main861059.shtml |
Publicly funded research tends to be groundbreaking with little to no attention given to the profitability of the research.
Privately funded research is all about profit, because of the nature of economics it tends to be less pioneering and instead focus on improvements or different varieties of medicine already developed. For instance, a pharmaceutical company's patent on a drug will expire in five years, so they do research to alter the medicine's chemistry and file a new patent. Then heavily market their new drug even though it has little to no advantage over the older drug or its generic brands, they can just make a lot more money from that drug because they have a patent.
If it wasn't for public funding, we would not have developed nuclear power plants, satellites, jet engines, and so forth simply because the profitibility of these devices were questionable. The government funded the research, and then when the private market saw that it could be profitable they jumped on board.
