It wasn't a premise, that research must serve a technical purpose. For me knowledge is one of the most noble things we can get. If it were for technical purposes the spin-offs of the attempts to get the difficult task done are anyhow much bigger than what I ever expect from the real physics.
But if you read in the media about LHC they will usually write about Higgs, extra dimensions, string-theory, sometimes Susy. But there are other interesting things as well and as a physicist working on bread and butter issues like meson spectroscopy I want to write about interesting stuff you can't read everywhere.

And selling is very important ;-)
Some time ago I read in the newspaper a discussion about humanities (word sounds strange, but that's what my dictionary gives me for 'Geisteswissenschaften') and science, where the author challenged the claim by humanists, they would be underfinanced due to the lack of economic useful results, as a myth. He wrote astronomers and particle physicists as well don't produce much more useful results, but are excellent at selling their work as important, while humanists lack any good PR for their subject.

Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den Menschen
Volker Pispers