Through their selective funding of research projects, pharmaceutical

I am responding to a pm from VoodooChild.

The critic making this argument is saying, essentially -- pharmaceutical companies only care about profits, not human welfare, so when they dump all this research money into the universities, they are essentially hijacking and manipulating the intellectual resources of that university for their own money-making schemes, again at the expense of human welfare. At an even more simplistic level, we could reduce the argument to: When universities receive research money from pharmaceutical companies, that's bad for human welfare. Fundamentally, that's what the critic is saying, between the lines.

Now, suppose the pharmaceutical company representative responds with (E): "Larger universities are the only ones equipped to conduct the kind of research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies." Then, the critic is going to say --- Yes, larger universities are the only ones big enough to handle your giant money-making schemes! Only larger universities have the resources that will ultimately allow you to line your pockets with vast quantities of graft. Without your influence, those larger universities could be working on research that directly benefits human welfare, but instead, you have forced them to work on stuff that will just benefit your bottom line!

Answer (E) addresses the choice of larger universities, rather than all universities --- that was a point made in passing in the argument, but it is not essential to the argument. Theoretically, the pharmaceutical companies could fund research at every single university, public and private, in the whole country --- then everyone would be manipulated by their money, and (according to the critic) human welfare would be hurt even more. That would be even worse! The argument about where the research is happening is not essential to the main argument. The essential thing is --- what really benefits human welfare? (E) doesn't touch that, and as I tried to make clear, a persistent critic would not be satisfied if they gave (E) as an answer.

Not all evidence is equal. Here, the argument contains what ostensibly is a line of evidence: "...only larger universities will be able to continue developing adequate research facilities ...", but even if this is completely cut out, denied, and the opposite is true --- every single university, big and small, gets pharmaceutical money ---- that would actually strengthen the argument, as far as the critic is concerned. If every single university, big and small, is under the profit-seeking influence of the pharmaceutical companies, then no one will do anything to benefit human welfare. It's not enough to attack what appears as evidence --- you have to think, contextually, about what it would mean for that piece of evidence to be false.

Meanwhile, if the the pharmaceutical company representative responds with (C):"If it were not for the funds which pharmaceutical companies provide, very little medical research could be conducted at all." If pharmaceutical companies don't invest, no research happens, no new cures or treatments for disease are developed, and human welfare is thereby hurt. The critic's argument, in its core form, is "Pharmaceutical money = bad", and this is the only answer choice that says anything like, ""Pharmaceutical money = good", which is what a rebuttal would have to say.

I totally agree with you --- this is, at best, a tepid rebuttal. The critic says to the pharmaceutical companies, "Your money makes the situation bad," and (C) is essentially saying, "Yes, but it would be even worse without our money." Yes, it's a kind of rebuttal, but hardly a ringing endorsement for the ethical standing of the pharmaceutical companies. A much more powerful rebuttal would be along the lines of what you suggested --- as you said, "author assumes that the expectations of the companies don't comply with human welfare", so something that attacks that assumption would be an excellent rebuttal. For example, the pharmaceutical company representative could have said, "The research from which we derive the greatest profits are profitable precisely because so many people benefit from the resultant breakthroughs." In other words, profits and human welfare are aligned, not at odds. That would be a powerful rebuttal (except that, in all likelihood, it's just corporate B.S that manipulates the facts and misrepresents the situation, but that's getting into second-order objections, much more complex than the GMAT CR involves).

Does all this make sense?

Mike