[throwmamatrain]

I would say that is a very strong criticism and very warranted! For note, I witnessed the immolation of two careers over retractions of papers that could not be replicated. You could say that the system worked. That was a while ago, and I'm sure the paper mill phenomenon is in full swing. You get echo chambers of PIs that rubber stamp each others work.

In my case, I was in basic science which hit a crisis near 2008 when the NIH was flat funded. This caused a come to Jesus moment, where suddenly all basic science labs were rebranded as translational medicine. My department was absolutely gutted, down from 15 or so PIs to maybe 8ish in the span of a year. Our field was bioenergetics which at the time was pretty competitive, and easy to link to diseases/metabolic disorders. We didn't work with pharma, some labs received contracts for small work. NIH was by far the biggest funder, followed by DARPA and other smaller health organizations.