You're really making my point for me. There are indeed plenty of options, and the profit motive motivates choices towards greater profits, not the greater good.

One of those decisions being risk-aversity and subsidizing most of their research, yes.

I work in cancer research in the UK, and ALL our money is coming from the government. Where there's a will and relevant priorities, there's a way. That's really the crucial part, because governments have plenty of money to spend. Where they spend it is the real question, not how to raise more.

That said, even just moving the extracted profit into taxes instead would yield a substantial improvement. People make money off of this. Stop that and move the money back into research.

Too bad that the reality of that theory is conglomerates eating up subsidies and then gouging us again for IP we've already paid for. There is no competition after capital accumulation has run its course and the legislative is captured by the few remaining monopolies.

Taxes aren't profit extraction and this idea that the profit motive is driving research is nonsense. Funding to conduct research is already taken from taxpayers.

Or maybe profit extraction on lifesaving drugs should be illegal and relevant patents should be public domain, so any government and organisation can produce and distribute them at cost at maximum.

Fair enough, I guess I can mostly only speak from my own experience. I come from the perspective where community members are forced out of their homes by rent-increases specifically to clear the properties for re-development, and the union steps in. That's exclusively where we use the term and oppose gentrification. I don't recall any case where we would have opposed entirely new properties being built.

The argument around gentrification is usually about replacing affordable housing, while displacing the current low-income tenants, not building extra housing.