I think you've got it from the wrong end. Most academic research I've seen has been so tainted by corporate funding, publish-or-perish haste, over-formalization, misuse of statistics, egos run wild, or some mixture of them all. Then there have been cases where novel research has been stomped into the ground by professional groupthink, like in Yudkin's case. At the same time we had guys like Shulgin being incredibly productive all on their own.
Think of MDMA alone. If it really ends up being a useful treatment, you just know a pharma company would insist that it ran them billions of dollars to develop, and that they should have a God-given right to gouge for it, but it came for considerably less than that from a real expert puttering around in his shack.
Sometimes I wonder if the independent researcher is our only hope.
This has nothing to do with what I said. I just implied sharing the costs for expensive equipment and consumables, what the out-of-academia scientists then do is up to them. I did not imply they are not independent.
But it is certainly close to impossible to coordinate without some kind of sci-funding.
Mostly picking at your last sentence. Even so. Once money starts sloshing around, the middlemen swoop in, the costs explode, what started as collaborative becomes institutional, and all of the institutional pathologies reinstate themselves.
Think of MDMA alone. If it really ends up being a useful treatment, you just know a pharma company would insist that it ran them billions of dollars to develop, and that they should have a God-given right to gouge for it, but it came for considerably less than that from a real expert puttering around in his shack.
Sometimes I wonder if the independent researcher is our only hope.