Is only government science good science?(government finance for pharmaceutical industry)

Iain Murray, "The Nationalization of Science." OnPoint, July 21, 2005, Competitive Enterprise Institute (cei.org)

Draconian new ethics rules threaten to forbid researchers at the National Institutes of Health from having ties with industry. Former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine allege that the pharmaceutical industry is tainting official science. The American Journal of Public Health publishes a special supplement on the supposed legal and judicial biases in favor of industry science. All of these attacks ignore the real danger: If government isolates basic science from industry to "protect" it, science will only be damaged.

Attempts to separate government-funded research from private exploration often underappreciate the massive investments that industry makes in science. From 1953 to 1980, government funded most of America's research and development investment, but since 1980, industry has spent so heavily on American science that it now provides two thirds of all U.S. scientific expenditure. Even if one separates off basic, academic research (as opposed to applied research and development), government still provides only about 50 percent of the national funding.

So, if industry-funded basic science is quarantined off from government science by ethics rules or legal requirements, the larger scientific research effort will suffer badly. Attempts to put such for-profit science in a box will ...