Society’s relationship with big pharma is love-hate. We despise how expensive new, life-saving drugs are, but we bite the bullet because the profit motive promotes the pharmaceutical industry to innovate like no other. That is a myth. Scientists working at universities and in the non-profit sector do the hard work. They lay the biological groundwork for pharma to swoop in at the last second and patent cures. Pharma is parasitic. Scientists can and should be in charge of nationalized pharmaceutical strategy because the current system is broken.