Perhaps I can jump in here.
You know, there's a difference in the research conducted with respect to the synchrotron and.... We're going back to “public good” science here, and perhaps this is longer-range public good.
You ask a very good question; I don't have the answer right off the top of my head. But the government should be concerned about anything that has the potential to affect public good or even have benefits for public good. We really don't know a lot of the spinoffs of this research, so the government should be associated with it in the long term and have stable funding for some people there. If that can be done through partnerships, that's fine; that may work in that particular instance, but it's not working in others.