Yup, IMHO you have a better grasp than the author. I've mainly built & developed labs for the analysis of very high-dollar materials, using the same advanced r

Yup, IMHO you have a better grasp than the author. I've mainly built & developed labs for the analysis of very high-dollar materials, using the same advanced research equipment that the academics & industrial researchers occasionally have breakthroughs on themselves. I'm an extreme problem-solver, compared to most of the other operators of similar equipment, and more experienced. On my own, it can still be challenging to make a lab both profitable and sustainable. So you do exactly this, substituting commercial activities for "teaching & administrative duties": "You will need forty hours a week to perform teaching and administrative duties, another twenty hours on top of that to conduct respectable research, and still another twenty hours to accomplish really important research.... Make an important discovery, and you are a successful scientist in the true, elitist sense in a profession where elitism is practiced without shame.... Fail to discover, and you are little or nothing." It follows that even if you are not an anti-social person, you will need to take on some anti-social responsibilities. That little feature of natural science has not changed since Edison was alive. Once the money-making milestone has been reached however, technical problems occasionally still need to be addressed, sometimes requiring a higher rate of breakthroughs compared to institutional operators. After those emergency challenges are overcome, why not put the same effort into untapped areas that come to mind, which might be addressable using the uniquely developed features of the particular facility? In the right hands this can sometimes lead to more commercially-exploitable breakthroughs than the direct solution of commercial problems themselves. There is also quite an advantage when owning your own apparatus compared to working on institutionally owned gear. Either way, over the last few decades I have consistently tried to invalidate the following statement: "Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown." In that area I have completely failed. That simple concept just gets more validated every decade no matter how I try to find an alternative. It turns out, you take a true intellect who has the innate curiosity and chooses to explore that particular unknown, provision them with some applicable resources and allow them free play. In return you get more scientific progress for your money than any other way so far. It doesn't even always require "amazing powers of observation", just not below average like many professors or technical administrators.