DISCUSSION 
sixty years hence? What method of experimentation enables 
us to set up a hypothesis and to test it on the assumption that 
we will have our answer fifty years hence? Isn’t this the 
problem ? 
Medawar: Idon’t believe itis. I have been wondering what 
is rather peculiar and unrealistic about this kind of discussion. 
Perhaps it is this: we already have that kind of control over 
behaviour and therefore, in a figurative sense, over the brain, 
which with other bodily systems, such as the endocrinological 
or the immunological, comes only from a deep knowledge and 
understanding of how they work. We don’t really have to 
know anything about neurophysiology or neuropsychology to 
put Dr. Chisholm’s recommendations into effect. We already 
have the appropriate kind of control over the mind. If we did 
the kind of things that John Young wants to do, we might do 
the job much more quickly and much more effectively; but 
what impedes us from putting Dr. Chisholm’s recommendations 
into effect is that people are indifferent, or people don’t agree 
about what is best to do. It is not lack of knowledge about how 
the brain works, is it? 
Young: I don’t agree. We even lack detailed knowledge of 
what the relevant signs are that elicit aggression. Worse still, 
we don’t know anything precise about the process by which we 
learn to react to members of our own group; or how we learn 
languages or mathematics. How can education be fully effective 
while we are so ignorant? 
Lederberg: Man has believed in education since Plato, and 
there is as yet no direct evidence that it in fact works in 
any predictable, constructive way. I don’t think we really 
know how to educate children so that these concepts can be 
instilled. 
Medawar: I think it is mistaken to say that we don’t know 
how to educate children although I am sure there are better 
ways of educating children than those we know now. But if 
we confine ourselves to the kind of thing Dr. Chisholm was 
saying, I don’t think we should say that lack of technical know- 
ledge is any obstacle to putting them into effect. 
so8 
