The article is only about a fraction of the issue, namely expert witness&#x2F;report payments. The title is also a bit silly since money (mostly tax payer money in case of academics) is also what makes research possible in the first place.
That being said I think it&#x27;s really hard to be objective if you get funding from a private source with a certain agenda. There&#x27;s some people who can pull it off and I have a lot of respect for them but for me it would simply be impossible to say with good consciousness that I wasn&#x27;t influenced at all.<p>However government money for research also has issues (I can only talk about how it works in Germany but it&#x27;s similar in most of Europe). Namely I think the practice of research projects is somewhat questionable. You need to build a consortium of anywhere form 3-10ish partners and write a proposal and hope it gets accepted. This results in 2-4 year projects that are funded. Sounds decent enough at first glance but the devil is in the details. First of all it is not a blind process so I fully expect some institutions&#x2F;individuals to get more or less autoaccepted due to name recognition alone. I can&#x27;t say for sure but there&#x27;s humans involved so anything else would surprise me. That unfortunately adds a political dimension.
As a young academic you (and your professor) rely on a stream of funded projects to keep you employed (there&#x27;s also non project-money jobs but these get rarer and rarer and are usually limited to 50% employment time) which means that your freedom of research is fairly limited (you can&#x27;t really publish a paper that isn&#x27;t related to the project and go to a conference for example) and more importantly there&#x27;s a constant need to reacquire new funding. If I were to guess people spend anywhere form 20-40% of their time trying to get new projects and not working on the actual projects they have already secured.
And of course this need for project money gives governments a good way of influencing what research is being conducted (which is somewhat opposed to the principle of freedom in research) as only things they offer will get funded.<p>Lastly, it is surprisingly hard to do research as an individual with no institutional backing if one doesn&#x27;t happen to have a good chunk of money set aside. Access to pay walled stuff (can be circumvented) and the need to travel to conferences (at least in CS) and depending on your field the need for costly equipment and access to test subjects.
There&#x27;s some developments in this regard (citizen research) and I hope it&#x27;ll get easier because I think there&#x27;s quite a few capable people who&#x27;d enjoy spending their free time on research that interests them and publish it when done.