Extrapolating from 2012 data, an estimated US$114.8B in the United States [18] is spent annually on life sciences research, with the pharmaceutical industry being the largest funder at 61.8%, followed by the federal government (31.5%), nonprofits (3.8%), and academia (3.0%) [20].

As long as the income was incoming, we were happy to trade funding our institutions with our money (tuition and endowment) for funding it with other people’s money (loans and grants.) And so long as college remained a source of cheap and effective job credentials, our new sources of support—students with loans, governments with research agendas—were happy to let us regard ourselves as priests instead of service workers.