"IN 1967 the National Science Foundation commissioned a study of the relationship between basic research and technological innovation. What role did “nonmission” research, research motivated solely by a desire for knowledge,, play in the development of new products of great economic and social significance, such as the electron microscope, the videotape recorder, and the oral contraceptive pill? Since the National Science Foundation existed to promote research, it was not surprising when the study revealed that 70 percent of the key events leading to technological innovation resulted from so-called nonmission research. Seventy-six percent of this basic work was done in university laboratories; 14 percent in research institutes and government laboratories. Industrial laboratories made only 10 percent of the original discoveries that advanced knowledge. Large diagrams were provided on which the red dots representing basic research stretched far into the past, while the blue symbols for “mission-oriented research” and the green symbols for “development and application” were clustered near the present. In the diagram explaining the origins of the pill, Arnold Berthold’s 1984 demonstration that castrated roosters do not behave like roosters was given equal billing with key events in the development of twentieth century endocrinology. The overall impression was one of a long chain of basic researches leading inevitably to an oral contraceptive."