Indeed. High capital fields such as medicine are the great entrepreneurial challenges of our time. Everyone on HN knows of the decaying behemoth that is academ

Indeed. High capital fields such as medicine are the great entrepreneurial challenges of our time. Everyone on HN knows of the decaying behemoth that is academic research. It is an unsustainable system built upon a terrible incentive architecture. Graduate students and postdocs are used as cheap labor in a Ponzi scheme, while Principal Investigators have no incentive to engage in difficult, high risk research due to salary caps and tenure. The market failure of academic research is the primary reason for the grinding pace of progress in fields such as medicine. Again, there are individuals such as Craig Venter who are changing this paradigm, but the sheer magnitude of funding being dumped into the academic research black hole is unfathomable. Our collective tax money is in the government's hands, and as such, only they have the power to dismantle such terribly broken schemes. I'm not holding my breath.