> would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech?

Private pharmaceutical R&D spending in the U.S. is around $100bn per year [1]. NIH spends another $50bn a year on biomedical research [2].

That eclipses total investments into adtech per se, which generously counted shouldn’t exceed $50 to 60bn. (And that only by counting like a third to a half of Google, Amazon, et cetera R&D and capital spending as adtech.) More precisely counted, it probably doesn’t exceed $10bn.

[1] https://phrma.org/blog/phrma-member-companies-rd-investments...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/final-nih-budget-202...