Totally disagree. Carnegie Institutions, Wellcome Trust, etc. are all 'private sector' and dispense millions of dollars of grants for fundamental research. You

Totally disagree. Carnegie Institutions, Wellcome Trust, etc. are all 'private sector' and dispense millions of dollars of grants for fundamental research. You probably mean, 'for-profit private sector'. But then, you disregard the several Nobel prizes that Bell Labs received, the intangible impact of IBM's Deep Blue and other programs on computing, etc. If solving a basic-science problem can result in several million dollars of revenue, you can be sure that a company will throw money and man-power at it. There are several examples even among the non-Bell Labs, non-IBM, non-Xerox companies: Google's search algorithms, pharma companies' Lipitor, Viagra, etc., Intel and AMD's industry-defining minuaturizations, 3M's optical films, etc. etc.