Thanks for the well informed response! I had not yet heard of Bayh-Dole and you gave me some good googlin'.
In regards to your explanation in [2], that sucks - I kinda figured that's how things were but I sorta went around academia rather than through it so it's interesting to hear. Any hot ideas about how it could be fixed?
1. replace the current academic funding model with pure fellowships. Each individual, from most junior to most senior, gets their own N year funding.
2. Each has a legal entity under which their IP lives and in which the government takes a small, fair, non-voting share.
3. Completely divorce this funding infrastructure from universities -- if someone wants to use part of their grant to pay for PhD courses/advising, great, but make it so that funding science is not contingent on that institutional apparatus.
In regards to your explanation in [2], that sucks - I kinda figured that's how things were but I sorta went around academia rather than through it so it's interesting to hear. Any hot ideas about how it could be fixed?