It’s not just medical research. Any field where one government agency (be it the NIH, the NIMH, or the NSF) is essentially the only source of funding has become moribund. A herd mentality takes over: you can only get funded if you’re doing what everyone else in your field is doing, since peer reviews on grant proposals otherwise mark the proposal down as ‘not mainstream’ or ‘unproven’ or ‘highly speculative’. (Look at theoretical physics, where string theory, 40 years without a testable prediction, predicting a massless scalar-field unobserved in nature, rules the roost.)
University administrations make it worse by seeing the science departments from medicine to physics, mathematics to botany, as cash cows and putting pressure not to tenure professors who don’t bring in grants. As a result only tenured professors can even attempt anything really innovative, and in high-cost fields like medicine or experimental physics only if they can come up with an alternative source of funding (much easier in medicine than in basic research).
Know one knows this more than Intel, which conducts a massive amount of not just development of the next chip, but research into the basic physics that lead to new generations of devices. My interest in this article is not just political, but comes from my own years of experience as a software contractor in Intel's Arizona facilities. Have you ever worked in a building with a water tower outside your office window? Only it's not water but liquid nitrogen, which is plumbed through to labs throughout the building.