- The carried interest loophole
- We could add small transaction taxes
- We could raise capital gains taxes
- We could be a little more focused on enforcing antitrust
- We could raise higher end marginal tax rates to reduce the relative attractiveness of off-scale payrate jobs
- We could provide better universal services to do the same
It's not like capital is uninvolved in the provision of biotech, or that medical startup founders aren't also motivated by massive tax-efficient future payouts, for example.
If anything I'd think you'd want to encourage the movement of investment into riskier bets, which would generally mean _decreasing_ capital gains taxes.
The onus is on the biomedicine industry to demonstrate it's capable of producing anything of societal importance because so far it's largely failed to deliver. There's nothing noble or scientific about throwing good money after bad into an industry that's continuously failed to deliver.
We can create mechanisms that enable more people to follow their own idea of what is important instead of merely what is lucrative. Not everyone will agree with the choices other people make, and it wouldn't eliminate money as a motivating factor, it would just slightly reduce the strength of that signal relative to other potential signals such as "I feel like I'm doing something meaningful."