"If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money" I doubt that -- rese

"If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money" I doubt that -- researchers do not have many sources of funding available to them. Grant money basically dictates the direction of research in the majority of fields. Grants come with all kinds of annoying strings attached (in grad school, I was once paid from a grant that specifically forbade us from purchasing desktops or laptops; we could, however, purchase rack mounted servers) and researchers still take them. What you need to understand is that researchers are usually more interested in padding their CVs than in getting patent rights. A professor trying to get tenure needs to bring in grant money, publish papers, and graduate some PhD students (who in turn need to be publish papers, etc.). There is not much room for turning down funding, just like there is not much room for pursuing lines of work that the government is not willing to fund.