I have spent some time in biological science research and your comments about grants holds very true. The result is that a lot of money is funneled into inefficient laboratories producing safe and often not very useful research, that is when they aren't hording results for a Nature paper that will never come. Sometimes this benefits some truly terrible people who are ruthless in their goal of climbing up the ivory tower. There are still plenty of great people in academia who are doing well, but I wish medical research at least tried to be as meritocratic as it claims to be. Right now the grant committees are an old boys club.