There is a heightened and novel appreciation of the importance of basic academic research to industry, both in American universities and in private business firms. Universities, in this period of increased costs and static income from governmental and private patrons, are considering the possibilities of new sources of funds to come from patenting the discoveries made by scientists holding academic appointments, from the sale of knowledge gained by research done under contract with commercial firms, and from entry into partnership with private business enterprises. By contracting with industry to conduct research in particular areas and by establishing offices to explore the economic potentialities of the results of the research done by their academic staffs, university administrators are beginning to exercise some of the functions of research administrators in private business. Many individual scientists within the universities are responding very favourably to those possibilities; some go further to create their own firms to exploit for profit their own discoveries. Thorstein Veblen's expectation, in the early twentieth century, that American universities would increasingly take on commercial characteristics, through the entrepreneurial activities of university presidents,1 has acquired a semblance of validity: university presidents and other administrative officials of universities have begun to consider in a very active way the acquisition of income for their universities by the performance of research and sale of the results to private enterprises through commercial agents. Opportunities for commercial utilisation of scientific research have been often available to scientists, but the traditional ethos of science did not permit them to erode the boundary between science and private, profitseeking business. What is new in the present situation is that many academic scientists no longer regard such constraints as necessary or right. Heretofore, in the wide gap between scientific discovery and application, business firms were expected to have their own industrial scientists conduct research and development which was an activity presumed to be inappropriate for academic scientists. In the more recent period, however, academic scientists have often been eager and willing to direct, or participate in, programmes of research and development, aiming at commercial application.