I'd expect any discussion of science in American universities that distinguishes between basic and applied research to put the Bayh-Dole legal framework coverin

I'd expect any discussion of science in American universities that distinguishes between basic and applied research to put the Bayh-Dole legal framework covering taxpayer-financed intellectual property front and center, in particular the nature of 'exclusive licenses' of university-sourced IP to private corporations. Historically, prior to Bayh-Dole in the early 1980s, basic research was done at universities and was mainly financed by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation, and applied research was done at industrial research centers like Bell Labs. Generating profitable intellectual property was the goal of the private research sector, but it relied heavily on the basic research at universities - eg development of semiconductor transistors follows this pathway, with a lot of basic scientific research in the first half of the 20th century followed by focused applied research efforts aimed at replacing vacuum tubes at Bell Labs. This whole system has gone off the rails in the USA, because under Bayh-Dole, corporations realized they could essentially cut their own R & D divisions, outsourcing their applied research to universities with funding supplied by taxpayers and cutting their own R & D division spending. This decimated a lot of basic research at the university level, and destroyed institutions like Bell Labs as well. Now, threatened cuts to federal funding for research are likely to do even more damage to scientific progress in the USA, conducted by people who don't even seem to understand the system created since the 1980s, flawed as it is. The solution is obvious: delete Bayh-Dole and make all taxpayer-funded research available to any US citizen or business under free non-exclusive licenses. Corporations will then be forced to reinvest in their own applied R & D divisions if they want that lucrative IP to be solely in their own hands. If this doesn't happen, the USA will become a second-rate follower of others work, and it's already happened to some extent, with Chinese universities now widely regarded as superior to American ones, by several metrics.