"McCormick apparently never understood that Searle had paid a large portion of Pincus’ salary for years. Rather, as McCormick explained to Abraham Stone, Pincus was “acquainted with some one [sic] in the Searl [sic] Company.” Exactly how he was able to convince them to provide free experimental drugs for the project on a large scale was never explained. In fact, Searle’s steroid chemists played an important role in the pill’s development. Although similar feats were being duplicated in a number of competing industrial laboratories, the large number of synthetic hormones that a they were producing gave Pincus an essential variety of compounds with a wide range of effects that he could try on animals, selecting for clinical trial only a few of the most promising out of the dozens that had some contraceptive effect. But McCormick has shielded from the commercial aspects of the project she was subsidizing. Nevertheless, her contribution was vital. She provided the funds that turned a desultory PPFA project into a crash program to develop an oral contraceptive. Pincus asked Searle for substantial help on the project only after he had suppressed ovulation in women with a progesterone regimen. By then he knew that he could develop an oral contraceptive. Searle’s cooperation simply hastened the process. When the first successful use of synthetic steroids as an oral contraceptive in women was announced in ‘’Science’’ in 1956, Sanger wrote McCormick: You must, indeed, feel a certain pride in your judgment. Gregory Pincus had been working for at least ten years on the progesterone of the reproductive process in animals. He had practically no money for this work and Dr. Stone and I did our best to get a few dollars for him and I think that the amount we collected went to pay the expenses of Chang [senior scientist, WFEB]. Then you came along with your fine interest and enthusiasm and with your faith and . . .things began to happen and at last the reports . . . are now out in the outstanding scientific magazine and the conspiracy of silence has been broken. Although “conspiracy of silence” may have been an exaggeration, throughout the late 1950s few scientists believed an oral contraceptive was at hand."