Well within living memory, actually. IBM research labs made many contributions to human knowledge without necessarily expecting short-term profit. I still remember when their scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope to write the letters IBM in xenon atoms, five atoms tall.

We have to adapt to today's world, but we should remember a better world, one in which it was not customary to treat life as a zero-sum game, did exist, not so long ago. Social problems only become unsolvable if everyone forgets they were once solved.