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Are you worried about government waste? Some years ago the @NSF gave a ~$300,000 grant to a UC Berkeley professor to study how bacteria get sick. Does that sound wasteful to you? 1/4
The research money resulted in the discovery of a new and cheap way to edit genes that could be used by the pharmaceutical industry and help people with previously untreatable genetic disease (it's called CRISPR-Cas9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR 2/4
The discovery has generated an industry currently worth more than $0.92 billion in 2020 – If less than one out of 3000 @NSF grants like this are successful the US taxpayer breaks even (without even counting the value to human health medical cures) 3/4 https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/global-crispr-technology-market-value-expected-to-reach-155-billion-by-2023-2020-08-20
Oh, by the way, the scientist, Jennifer Doudna, was just awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery. 4/4
