as someone else noted, a lot of this is done as a form of grant-securing, and it's done on a long-term 'maintenance' basis rather than on experiment-basis.

a 'better option' would be the removal of such political and economical games from facilities that are supposed to be doing research; this reduces the suffering and death without much loss to discovery and progress.

the trick being that we, as humans in this world, have little hope of removing extraneous politics from where they do not belong.

but I just care to point out that we're nowhere-near optimal w.r.t. how we operate in the research sector. it can be better.