"Well, basic research gets you two economic benefits: intellectual property and patents. To recoup the investment in R&D, you need a gentlemen’s agreement that inventors get exclusive rights to their own discoveries. But the Chinese never liked ‘intellectual property.’ We never stopped pressuring them about the issue, and finally a major trade war broke out, and the Chinese just called our bluff. They made all English-language intellectual property freely available on their satellite networks to anybody in the world. They gave away our store for nothing, and it bankrupted us. So now, thanks to the Chinese, basic science has lost its economic underpinnings. We have to live on pure prestige now, and that’s a very thin way to live."