This chestnut gets trodded out every so often but it's frankly absolute and total nonsense sold by anti-intellectuals and bought by people from all walks of life.

Science is and always was incremental. The breakthroughs come from truly unforeseeable places. It takes seemingly niche and unprofitable and incremental research like studying bacteria living in volcano vents, for us to have PCR.

VCs expect a sliver of their companies to become Unicorns, we understand it to be a numbers game. That grace is given to entrepreneurs but scientists need to grovel for cash and endlessly show that their research is "translatable" or sufficiently impactful.

Sorry, I've heard this one too many times before. Thanks for your contribution to our world's knowledge, I hope you value it as much as I do.

VCs don't manage public money, and they also have their own filters to pick who gets to play the lottery. (And the VC ecosystem has its own set of impact metrics. the sacred KPIs! CLV, CAC, YoY! and of course just scientists know which grant organization wants which buzzwords, just as founders know which VC loves which overhyped contemporary meme.)

None of these spheres of life are, uhm, perfect, but this PR problem is completely the fault of academia, that they cannot sell this lottery model as well as the biz world. (Though I think maybe we should take a minute to consider how well loved investors and capitalists are nowadays!)