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The middle twentieth century saw a golden age in medical breakthroughs in a context where only modest numbers (and percentages) of people did 'medical research'.
Whether in the hope that this progress could be continued, or simply from self-interestedly using past breakthroughs as leverage for increasing future resource, medical research funding was vastly exanded from the nineteen sixties - doubling about every decade.
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Nowadays, 'medical research' - i.e. research justified by supposedly having medical relevance - is by far the biggest area of science.
Scientists working in areas that were close to medicine began to re-orientate their research in order to justify applying for these sources of funding.
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Basic biologists working in cell chemistry, immunology, genetics - began to argue that their work may have potential medical relevance.
It worked - since they are doing 'hard science' full-time they got funded in preference to the kind of part-time, intuitive, semi-researching clinical doctors who had made the earlier therapeutic breakthoughs.
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Pretty soon 'may have potential relevance' in basic science was hyped into 'clinical importance' - and the mythology arose that medical breakthroughs came from basic science.
So, funding basic scince on the mistaken basis that it would lead to breakthroughs destroyed clinical research - not least becausse un-funded research no longer counted as research.
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It also wrecked basic science, since it was shaped by a fake imperative to generate supposedly therapeutic benefits (science is so difficult that unless you do it as well as possible, aiming at the thing you are best able to achieve; then it doesn't happen - compromise is fatal.)
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So funding ended up driving 'science' - which is not effective, nor is it science.
'Science' is evaluated by the funding it attracts; 'science' is done to get funding.
And the whole thing worked by incrementally-increasing dishonesty - if you expand science by encouraging dishonesty, then pretty soon that's all you have - because it is a lot easier to be dishonest, than to do science.
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