It’s important to remember that the US government isn’t a democracy – it’s not ruled by or for the populous. The interest of the elites who control the government is first and foremost to retain and accumulate power. That’s not to say that elites are anti-technology, but rather they’re more interested in avoiding taxes and securing technologies for themselves than in recklessly funding wide spread innovations. The current system does that by taxing the bottom 95% of the population to fund basic research at universities (which even accept poor people as scientists) then allowing elites to attempt to control the innovations as they walk them the last mile to implementation. Of-course, these attempts at control have had a uncomfortable fail rate - often spawning new oligarchs. It seems like some portion of the current batch of oligarchs is having second thoughts about allowing any innovation at all, and thus going after universities.

I should emphasize that not all of this is conscious reasoning, rather there’s a lot of “this direction is not in my self interest therefore it’s bad” reasoning from oligarchs, which manifest in a system that effectively operates under this reasoning. Of-course, let’s not pretend the oligarchs are stupid either. I have no doubt that this is a conscious and deliberate push for some of them. Doesn’t really matter.

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Also, I’m a structural biologist, so let me judge your research proposal: 15M funds 6 people for 4 years, and understanding the molecular structure of enzymes is really important for drug development. Proteins (including enzymes) often come in families with related functions, so understanding “milk enzymes in cows hair” might actually shed a lot of light on an entire family of enzymes with broad biological effects. In fact studying many variants across many species is a component of how we got alphafold and the current claude attempt to compete with pharmaceutical companies to develop small-molecule drugs.