I agree that one of the main problems of science today is the brain drain from academic research to for-profit entities. If we're being honest, they both need e

I agree that one of the main problems of science today is the brain drain from academic research to for-profit entities. If we're being honest, they both need each other; the academics need industry to produce instruments and perform speculative engineering projects, and the industry needs the academics to train fresh scientists and buy their products. A big problem is that academics are constantly reminded by the palpable superiority of their private sector brethren; the private sector people dress better (not ratty), drive better cars (not broken shitboxes), have larger apartments (not holes in the ground), flashier parties, shorter hours, and upward potential. Here's a solution which doesn't disrupt the good aspects of the status quo: get the government and grant-giving entities to provide more money (read: 65-140k instead of 18-50k) specifically for researcher salaries. That way, research that is created via public money is still completely open to the public and other researchers, and there isn't an incentive to leave research in order to make more money by leaving. The private sector can still try to poach academics with higher salaries, but now they'll have a harder time. The alternative is a continuation down the current path of patent trolling and progress-halting intellectual property law. When you're blocked from making progress on an idea for many years because someone else thought of it first, there are real consequences... namely that a lot of the important fleshing-out of an initial idea isn't subjected to any kind of rigorous external criticism and refinement. It creates weird gaps where ideas that have been around for a long time are only recently free to explore, leading to realizations of potential past-applications lost. Scientific progress is a network of nodes which moves forward through the dimensions of sophistication and time based on how many connections there are between nodes; enough blocked connections leads to big slowdowns across an entire field. For this reason, I am against intellectual property.