What do you mean they are funded by public money? I thought Google is paying a clinic to get samples and pay researchers to work on the project, but the researchers have to get approval from the review board of their respective institution. The review board is funded by public money (more or less) I guess, but other than that, what else?
> I prefer having research funded by public money without seeking a profit.
Now that I read what you wrote twice I might interpret your original sentence wrong. I thought you were implying the work they doing with Google is using public money ("I prefer research funded by public money [done by these researchers to be non-profit].")
You meant you prefer to have public institutions to carry out the research.
Well, in that case, it's only temporary. There are public and private AIDS research, but in the end, the public research is used to seek for profit. Say Google, IBM, Microsoft donates 10B to make this a non-profit research, the end product (the algorithms, etc) will be used by private companies anyway. So I don't see how public vs private really matter if the data and results are going to be publicly known by private company later on for profit.
But if you are going for "pure knowledge", sure, public research would be ideal :D
