The thing is, Nobel Prizes and other awards don't pay the bills.

Patents do, but in most cases it's trivial patents or patents for a "mutually assured destruction" portfolio (aka, you keep them in hand should someone ever decide to sue you).

That's a fundamental problem with how the Western sphere prioritizes and funds R&D. Either it has direct and massive ROI promises (that's how most pharma R&D works), some sort of government backing (that's how we got mRNA - pharma corps weren't interested, or how we got the Internet, lasers, radar and microwaves) or some uber wealthy billionaire (that's how we got Tesla and SpaceX, although government aids certainly helped).

All while we are cutting back government R&D funding in the pursuit of "austerity", China just floods the system with money. And they are winning the war.