Some of our more surprising findings were made with industrial funding. The horse is out of the barn. Secrecy and competitiveness are not inventions of biotechnology. But this has made it much worse. While that entirely seems reasonable, the nature of the world of business is not a charity.
Profit is what matters, the bottomline counts.
You don't want to give your secrets away to your competitor. But that's at right angles with what is the nature of science. It's supposed to be an activity to advance knowledge in which, when you find something out, you tell other people so other people can check it out. Here we build in a time-delay to make the money possible. There are two ways of looking at the industrial relationship that an academic scholar can involve him- or herself in.