Part of the role of government is to fund research that may not pay off for 20 years, or 50 years, or a century.
Corporations do indeed do a large amount of R&D, but it's much more focused, and needs to impact the bottom line on a much shorter timeframe (say ~5 years).
Because of this, there's a large amount of very important research that will never be funded by anything other than a quasi-governmental organization.
Not all corporations are for-profit.
> Part of the role of government is to fund research that may not pay off for 20 years, or 50 years, or a century.
What? Can you point to me where it says that?
Who else will fund it, though?
As far as the non-profit angle, that's what I was implying by quasi in "quasi-governmental". I definitely could have worded that better, though.
HHMI also does this at its in-house Janelia Farms campus.
Not basic science, but Salk and Sabin developed the polio vaccines without much federal help (via march of dimes, a nonprofit) - and didn't even patent their vaccines.
Much basic science in the pre-1940 era was funded internally by the research institutes they were at.
And there are basic science foundations that get the patronage of industry, just because, they're so gosh derned nice, and some that do limited basic science on the side while doing applied that passes patents onto the for-profit (lucent/bell labs, Xerox PARC).