[naasking]

All well and good, but not an argument that the science here has to be publicly funded, and that a commercial research enterprise providing this library is not viable. The question was about what benefits come from the public funding, in particular, benefits that simply cannot be provided by a commercial enterprise or alternative approaches. You merely stated this was the case and I'm asking for the reasons.

Even supposing the costs associated with basic research can't be recouped commercially using existing technology, that does not suggest that alternatives are not possible. For instance, in a world in which this library was not created, perhaps the set of talented industrial chemists in our timeline would have studied physics or computer science instead and advanced quantum chemistry simulations that capture some, most or even all of the utility of this empirical approach.

I can look at what you describe and acknowledge that it's useful without automatically accepting that it's a) not commercializable, and b) impossible to work around, which is what you were implying.