Disagree vehemently. HHMI funds what’s fashionable. Find me a HHMI investigator without a recent CNS paper. As with Nobel prizes, the true innovators always seem to make their discoveries outside the power circle.
He (or she)'s not disagreeing with the notion that unfettered funding produces innovation, he (or she)'s disagreeing with the notion that HHMI provides unfettered funding.
Part of the beauty of Bell Labs was that it wasn't necessarily all about fame and grandstanding- a lot of folks who were working there were just normal, unassuming New Jersey folk who put in a good days work messing around with whatever they were tasked with. The only analogous example to that sort of dynamic today might be amongst the workers at large government agencies like NIST and the NIH; it's unlikely that many of them will ever become rockstars in today's research climate, but they dutifully carry out experiments nonetheless.