(snipped)
This has only occurred because of taxpayer funded research. In colleges supported by private money and investment money like the Cambridge colleges they could research anything they wanted without asking for money from governments. Hence you had independence and minds free to delve into anything that interested them.
Without that independence you would never have had Newton spending years just thinking and playing with lenses, or Rutherford speculating about nuclear physics, or Watson and Crick spending ten years on DNA. No end in sight. No deadlines. No thought about financial rewards. Just pure research, allowed because money was not the arbiter.
Post war Accountancy changed all that. By 1960 aristocratic families who once had their brighter offspring study whatever they wanted for the sheer love of learning, and supported the colleges with vast sums of money now had to get in a socialist queue based on 'merit' and so withdrew their donations...what was left after 80% tax. Watson and Crick just scraped in to finish their work with donated college money before the Merit Clbutt was admitted and funded by the State. Darwin himself would never have even been admitted in today's political climate.
And what has Cambridge produced since 1963 and public money decided what was worth studying for the greatest return ?
Only huge corporate funded American universities can fund basic research thinking now. I suppose you could say that American Corporations are now doing what the British ruling clbutt used to do.
