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Hmm, I think I've mis-read your comment then. My apologies. That said, if you don't mind I'll let it stand as is -- perhaps as a comment on the OP. My point is "cancer research OR Facebook" is not a choice anyone goes out to make consciously: they study a specialty and then seek out the most rewarding (according to their own definition of "rewarding") career options available to them. If one is interested in building distributed systems, there is simply more opportunity to do so at Google, Facebook, or other places in the software/Internet industry than in other industries (that's not to say those opportunities don't exist elsewhere, of course).

I do agree that it's B.S. to say that legal challenges prevent investment in cancer research (unless people mean "coconut oil cures cancer" type of research, in which case they well should). I would probably say that if anything current patent law makes cancer research more profitable that it would be without it (however, I don't have enough of legal background to speak definitively on this).