Scientists worry about the cuts to NIH funding, but the cuts to pharmaceutical research are ten times more worrying - who is going to develop the compounds to replace the current set of antibiotics when they have become useless? Wall Street is entirely unequipped to deal with this question; there are things that cannot be bought with money or at market, and scientific progress is one of them.
Pfizer got out of antibacterial R&D a few years back.
And I have to take issue with your comment "scientific progress can't be bought with money". What do you call all the new drugs that have been produced in the last century? It wasn't done by the government. Yes, basic research funded by the NIH advanced basic science, but it didn't put those pills in a bottle.
"who is going to develop the compounds to replace the current set of antibiotics when they have become useless" - Academic science. Most of the basic, foundational research in clinical medicine is done by academia, not the pharmaceutical industry.
It's not to streamline drug development, the deal is a tax dodge in its entirety. Some lovely commentary down the hallway, in the Pipeline: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/28/pfizer_and_a...
Scientists worry about the cuts to NIH funding, but the cuts to pharmaceutical research are ten times more worrying - who is going to develop the compounds to replace the current set of antibiotics when they have become useless? Wall Street is entirely unequipped to deal with this question; there are things that cannot be bought with money or at market, and scientific progress is one of them.