true enough
henry ford didnt get tax money
Alexander bell didnt either
i dont know
Unfortunately, it is not so simple as 'not taking tax money'. A great deal of the level of research that needs to be done is generally accomplished at the university level. which have, since their foundation, relied upon grants and patronages of the local authority. In the US, many of these institutions are specifically public schools, established by state legislatures, and funded in part through money given the states by the Federal government.
Yes, there are private universities. The only difference is that the student walks out of a private university roughly $100,000 deeper in debt than the public school student. Any research still requires outside funding resources, typically both governmental and private.
Now, with the way the rules are written, when one is forbidden to use tax money for a particular purpose, anything whatsoever purchased with even one penny of money from the government cannot be used in that purpose, no matter what else I am using it for... including things like rooms, electricity, microscopes, etc. Every jot and tittle paid for by the government must be accounted for, and it still belongs to the government. It gets used wherever permitted, but not for the research that you can't spend federal money on.
Asking a public university, which is likely already cash-strapped, to go out, solicit tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, in order to build and staff duplicate labs is a ridiculous waste of resources. Therefore, it is simply not spent. The restriction of spending becomes an effective ban on research at these facilities.
Even if not one single further federal dollar is spent, allowing those private institutions who desire to do work with the universities to do so is a major furthering of the art. Just letting the extant biopharmaceticals and research foundations actually use the existing infrastructure is huge.
Goverment Money, however, is generally requested and spent by the agency, and there are going to be two agencies lining up at the universities - Health and Human Services.. and the Pentagon, through the branch research labs. The price of 1 F-22 can pay for dozens, if not hundreds of research projects dedicated to putting wounded soldiers back together. They want it, and the military is nothing if not forwards looking when it comes to research.
PS: Much of Bell's work rested on research coming out of German universities - funded traditionally by nobility, and later, the government. He also spent at least some time working on the predecessor to the telephone while employed as a professor at a publically chartered university.
