This proposal seems ill-founded. The idea that the public sector takes on the risk of early development is a misuse of the word ‘risk’. No funding agency ever t

This proposal seems ill-founded. The idea that the public sector takes on the risk of early development is a misuse of the word ‘risk’. No funding agency ever thinks of investment in terms of financial risk. The money allocated to an individual project is extremely small in the scheme of things, and research budgets remain a small proportion of government spending overall. Pharma in contrast spends 8-20% of total expend on research. The long term trends don’t support this narrative either, with government spending becoming less important and privately funded research increasing [1]. [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern...