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[[Ayn Rand]] did not believe that the government had any business funding scientific research, basic or applied. She used her Project X account partly as a plot device to explain the destruction of a key bridge, but primarily to express her fear that government-funded research will always lend itself to the construction of instruments of tyranny, and was therefore something to be strictly forbidden in a sound society.

[[Ayn Rand]] did not believe that the government had any business funding scientific research, basic or applied. She used her Project X account partly as a plot device to explain the destruction of a key bridge, but primarily to express her fear that government-funded research will always lend itself to the construction of instruments of tyranny, and was therefore something to be strictly forbidden in a sound society.

Indeed, [[John Galt]] weighs in on this very subject:{{cquote|[T]he damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who ''had'' the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of "pure knowledge"—the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpuse on this earth—who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn money and sell their souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And since there is no such thing as "non-practical knowledge" or any sort of "disinterested" action, since they scorn the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction. They, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, ''they'' are the damned on this earth, ''theirs'' is the guilt beyond forgiveness.}}

Indeed, [[John Galt]] weighs in on this very subject:{{cquote|[T]he damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who ''had'' the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of "pure knowledge"—the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpose on this earth—who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn money and sell their souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And since there is no such thing as "non-practical knowledge" or any sort of "disinterested" action, since they scorn the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction. They, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, ''they'' are the damned on this earth, ''theirs'' is the guilt beyond forgiveness.}}

Nor was Miss Rand the only author to express such a fear. The motion picture ''Atlantis'' includes a short dialogue in which a character who invented a wide-area space-heating device saw that device re-engineered to be a weapon, a result that he found not merely distasteful but despicable.

Nor was Miss Rand the only author to express such a fear. The motion picture ''Atlantis'' includes a short dialogue in which a character who invented a wide-area space-heating device saw that device re-engineered to be a weapon, a result that he found not merely distasteful but despicable.