hat about the third category, which is what the public sector has done, but which you do not give them credit for. In the excellent book Steal this Idea, Michael Perelman documents how research conducted by the government at the NIH is handed over to private companies for next to nothing. Have you read that book? It is well worth reading in its entirety.

We have to remember that no laws, regulations, or traditions have prevented the public research system from inventing the drugs we need if it was really capable of doing that and no one else was,

But it has–breakthrough drugs like Penicillin and treatments like MRI were developed by publicly funded research, not at a private corporation.