This piece misses the realities of funding and labor for top-tier science. Labor: Graduate students are inexpensive and doing the work for love. Without them,

This piece misses the realities of funding and labor for top-tier science. Labor: Graduate students are inexpensive and doing the work for love. Without them, science becomes extremely expensive (and more effective, but not more-effective enough to, apparently, be worth the price of staff scientists). Funding: Good luck getting the NSF to fund your proposal at actual market rate, especially if you don't intend to educate any graduate students. There is a lot of societal value in basic science, but the returns happen on decadal and multi-decadal scales. Few non-governmental partners, other than philanthropic former scientists or science philanthropists (thank you, Keck and Simons Foundations!) have the vision and commitment to reap and sow scientific progress. Science has always been free to leave the university, and it often does, but the lack of self-emergent long-term science institutions (Where's the private NIST, LHC, LIGO, or Webb?) suggests that it's a tough road to travel. When there's enough near-term promise, as in quantum-computing or genomic sequencing, industry can leap in and drive things forward.