"a fair price"
Obviously tung in check, but that tends to be how early stage basic research goes. You keep the spending low until you know enough to know more specifically what you should be prioritizing. A lot of early stage ideas are never going to go anywhere. And once the researchers have a proof of concept, there's still a much, much larger amount that will need to be spent to get it to commercial scale production.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
