Doesn't affect my way of life. No reason for me to care or contribute.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/lines/IAtransitional.shtml

"Hey Tim, how do you "teach evolution", champ? Since there are no transitional forms in the fossil record and since Darwin's theory has taken it on the chin for the past decade and Darwinians are really starting to look like religious zealots with no game... what is this "evidence and reason" you're talking about?"

I am glad you are outta here for a few weeks. Sad that your last statement before you leave is a lie.

Lying is immoral.

To state that there are no "transitional forms" is a lie. Transitional forms exists everywhere.

Do you lie to your children too?

"misguided effort : finding a cure for a disease should be an effort driven by profit, not goodwill."

JUST WHAT KIND OF NONSENSE ARE YOU SPEWING NOW?

So first of all, I'm not sure how different science research would be in the perfect free market world. A couple things I've learned from my little exposure to the scientific world is that the community is driven by what I might consider pseudo-market forces. The incentive isn't purely money, but partly comes from the egoism of scientists (I can say this because I'm a scientist :) ). In the physics world at least, the physicists with the reputation as the hardest-workers are those aiming for a Nobel. Within the larger scientific community, though, challenging the status quo is still the goal for most. (As an aside, a reason it's difficult for many to disbelieve evolution is that scientists would be working their asses off if they could find some solid piece of evidence that would turn the field upside down and they could get credit for it). So the desire for a major breakthrough and recognition with an individualist's philosophy is one pseudo-force that has put the US ahead in getting it's name on 48 'Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine' just since 1950 (with many more before that of course-I stopped counting after a while http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Physiology_or_Medicine)

That said, money is of course also a major issue in science. If you want to keep doing research, you have to keep getting results for funding. Private groups like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Gates foundation wouldn't be giving startup funding to groups who they are convinced will produce crappy (or no) results. It's a stiff competition in every field to do well enough to get funding.

Beyond the pride and funding pseudo-market incentives, however, is a real market incentive-namely whenever they do create a new drug, they sell the rights to drug companies for a significant price. I just read an estimate that says a third of the drugs on the market are created in research universities, so these research environments end up being sort of proxies for market corporations that keep the competition going (though the BOINC project I mentioned earlier is supposed to be not for profit).

Finally, I would even donate my computer's spare time to the project even if the information it produced were available to the public. This particular computing network runs about 66 teraflops, which something like Blue Gene could also do, but for millions of dollars more. I see this similar to open-source projects like Linux. Luckily free individuals have fun with their inventiveness and put it up in the open. Linux designed something like what mac now calls 'spaces' a while ago. This didn't end up hurting the market, but in fact raised the floor for what is acceptable in the market so now my mac has a spaces program packaged in by default. Wikipedia is similarly created by open-source type contributions, and they just pressure brittanica online and other knowledge bases to make their services that much better if they want people to pay for them. I similarly see the BOINC network as raising the standards to cause drug company R&D teams to find better methods of research and pressuring IBM and computing companies to produce cheaper and faster computers for those who need more control and instant power than a loose network of free individuals can offer.

I'm not sure how von Mises would view open sourcing and the market, but it doesn't sound like a bad idea at all to raise the floor for what is doable in the market place, especially if it is at no cost to me and I'm doing it on my own accord. But I'm open to corrections/criticism if you have any.

hmmm... it seems to me that people are still not getting it.
let me put it in general terms once again:

1. profit is an incentive which brings results.
2. charity and subsidies are an obstacle to progress because they remove incentive.

is this so hard to understand? this is true everywhere you look but you ladies are obviously so emotionally charged about thinking you're part of a solution that you're willing to discard this truth.

i gave you a very good example of what charity can result in:
"Researcher Dr Chris Tselepis worked with an international team which has found that TE7, an experimental culture of cancer cells used in labs for the past 20 years, was the wrong cancer."

a company doing research purely based on a profit incentive would not have made such a mistake. 20 years of wrong research, useless. 20 years of capable people being completely useless. people like you enable this sort of thing when these researchers could have been working under proper scrutiny that is actually required by a company which stands to lose money on a mistake of that proportion.
so put a bandaid on your bleeding hearts, wipe your tears, grow a pair and understand how the real world works.