Yes, that's what I meant to say. The defense here tends to sound like "he wasn't deliberately skewing his research to appease his paymasters!" and it may well be true, but that doesn't mean they didn't influence the results.

Conversely, if you want people to be susceptible to mustache-twirling villains offer as little money as possible with no job security what so ever.

Modern hard sciences academia is a horrible place and the problem is economic: there are too many scientists and too few jobs for them.

To quote Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:

>Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree,and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. Later, he was to calculate that, at the going rates for programmers, the department had extracted about a quarter of a million dollars' worth of work from him, in return for an outlay of less than twenty thousand.

What about bald cat-caressing villains?