No, that's not reasonable. I know, they should just fund the research that will eventually be proven to be ground breaking. Seems pretty straight forward. Of course they are dependent on the research at Penn for the crystal ball.
That’s great, but assuming she (and everyone else working on research that they felt was important) expected to be paid, the money has to come from somewhere, right? Tuition costs are already too high and we are calling in the government to pay for student loans. So what do people expect? Obviously with a crystal ball they probably would have kept her funded (if this is even the full story - and it probably isn’t), but we shouldn’t blame them for not having one. 20+ years with no takers sounds like a pretty fair shake. Are they just supposed to fund everyone indefinitely so they can never be accused of missing something good?
Not even VCs have a great track record at picking winners, and they do this for a living.
> Are they just supposed to fund everyone indefinitely so they can never be accused of missing something good?
No, of course not - that is just an unhelpful false-dichotomy straw man reply (like the whole of wuwuno's).
The issue of funding both fundamental research and that which lacks a pathway to short-term profitability is a difficult one, much more subtle than you presented in your original post, where getting VC funding was presented as the sole criterion that mattered (the point of view given in that post amounted to saying that delegating all decisions to VCs was the proper way to go about it.)
One of the reasons vaccine reasearch hasn't been attracting a lot of VC funding is that vaccines are not nearly the money-makers that drugs and tests are. We're lucky that some research was kept going despite this, and the lesson from that is that we should not trust in VC funding being the predominant determinant of funding.
