sometimes, if you want to be at the right meetings to get the right information to further your research, you need to compromise a little.

and, that's what happens when you open up research dollars to private funding - the most powerful lobbyists stand in between academics and their research, and are able to extract concessions in exchange for access.

it's fundamentally incompatible with a free society. but, if america was anything approaching a free society in the past, it hasn't been in a long time.