This sounds bad when you first hear it. I do wonder though if this might counterintuitively lead to a better R&D outcome overall than if they individual company

This sounds bad when you first hear it. I do wonder though if this might counterintuitively lead to a better R&D outcome overall than if they individual company invested much more into R&D. This would render the industry uninteresting to private investors which would mean that we might end to in a scenario where it's all publicly funded. This would likely lead to the reduction in salaries also which addresses the other criticism from the article. We'd look at a much smaller pharmaceutical research industry that cannot afford to attract the best and the brightest. It's also important for tech people to understand how different it looks to start a pharma startup. Funding requirements are orders of magnitude higher which also means the share of the company founders can retain is really tiny compared to tech and so are the gains from an exit that founders get. Now one could argue that just making pharma a little bit less profitable would be a win, but even here I wonder. If I can get just 1% higher returns on my investment by cutting out pharma from my portfolio I'd do so immediately.