[ClumsyPilot]

> The pharma industry COULD do their own foundational research

Citation neeeded - have they ever done so? Would the shareholders accept it? Would they be able to manage borderline autistic PHD types detached from reality, and would these scientists want to work there?

[robotresearcher]

Pharma companies are chock full of PhD types, as are the tech companies and Wall Street.

What companies don’t have is PhD students. They are numerous, smart, very cheap, and work very hard.

[Jensson]

PhD types doesn't mean they make foundational research.

> They are numerous, smart, very cheap, and work very hard.

Yeah, this is a good reason to hire such people, but they generally don't do foundational research work at companies, and if they do it is extremely narrow.

Just like government work the problem is the environment, Governments hires management and planning types just like companies do, but that doesn't mean they can scale up like a company can. Same with foundational research, private companies aren't a good place to do that.

[Nifty3929]

Really? Outside of pharma businesses do all kinds of time consuming, speculative and expensive foundational research.

I'm not quite sure why pharma is the exception.

[sudosysgen]

It's difficult to overstate just how menial, fiddly, difficult, risky, time consuming and unclearly profitable foundational biomedical research is. A research project could easily take 4-5 years, have a 5% likelihood of success, and have no clear monetizability, yet end up being a groundbreaking foundational result and necessary to investigate.

In other fields, either there's some tangible hope of profit down the road, or at least you can attract talent and prestige. Not so much here.