Nope. There is no such thing as a wealthy university researcher.

...Researchers will kill their firstborn for the right seat at the right institution, Places like MIT, CMU, caltech and etc simply have to ask and the targeted researcher will come running at top speed. Pay has little to do with it as in most cases you are balancing a pitance vs a pitance and a penny.

This is true. Money isn't a major driver for scientists (other than enough to survive and do their work) any more than money is the primary driver for politicians. That doesn't mean what is driving them cannot be a corrupting influence, though. In the case of politicians, I don't find raving powerlust to be any more appealing than simple financial greed.

"You believe most hard science is created in academia - it's not."

Yes, It is.

"Almost all breakthroughs are formed in the corporate sector by teams of research scientists in corporate labs. IBM, GM, Sony, Proctor & Gamble...the list is endless. The internet was a military project, the secret to headache and pain relief was a job for the chemistry slaves at Johnson & Johnson. The corporate sector is often at odds with the idealism and anti-capitalistic tendencies of the educational institutions. If one is talented one will discard the leftist cloak of righteousness and go to work for the corporate sector."

Oh. my. god. You really have no idea what you are talking about, do you? The output of MIT, CMU, JH, CalTech etc... Any ONE of them DWARFS the output of even Microsoft, Xerox, Bel Labs etc. Why do you think these businesses PAY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to academia!? To have them DO RESEARCH FOR THEM, YOU NITWIT!

Not sure that Microsoft paying a university to do research would not come under "corporate-funded" research, but this is a hard question to pin down. There is privately-funded research, but that breaks down into research funded by profit-making companies and by foundations and the like. Government-funded research is not easy to pin down either. Much research is funded in some ways by all of these. Corporations spend much more on applied research than pure research, and universities and such reverse that ratio.

I've worked at Stanford, and believe me, not all the talent is in the corporate sector. However, a number of things the people I worked around (not with) were developing did eventually have considerable commercial applications. Had to do with GPS.

To be honest, I think most scientists don't give a rat's ass for politics. Those few that do tend to float to the top in organizations like the UCS.