Comment by dekhn

I don't think industry can replace academic research for a more fundamental reason. It is rare for industry to willingly research things that are not on a direct path for profitability. Profitibility is calculated in a very local manner (direct cost and revenue); it doesn't consider indirect benefits, such as a basic biology research team discovering some fundamental new detail of biology which allows another team to do a better job discovering a new pharmaceutical drug. It does happen sometimes; my employer is a biotech/pharma that does a huge amount of basic research in addition to its focused pharma research, because they know that the basic research occasionally makes discoveries that greatly improve the pharma process.

IIUC, industry does get R&D tax credits- but that's probably not a good incentive system for basic research in industry.

What's happening now is that a small number of science-friendly rich people are making foundations/institutes that carry out basic research (Zuckerberg/Chan, Schmidt, and a few others) but it's unlikely those will completely supplant academic research at universities funded by NIH/NSF/DOE.