DISCUSSION 
At the same time, they tolerate twenty thousand people a year 
dying of lung cancer, five or six thousand dying in car accidents, 
a hundred thousand or more injured in road accidents, with 
apparent equanimity. Perhaps it just depends how many 
people are killed at a time. A hundred in an air crash gets 
much more reaction than a hundred people separately on the 
roads. 
I would like to turn to the point that Haldane made about the 
problem of controlling degenerative diseases which occur in 
later life, presumably based on genetic changes but not selective 
because they do not manifest themselves until after the repro- 
ductive period. It would obviously be difficult to eliminate 
those, I imagine; but we may hope to do something in the way 
of prevention and treatment. But here again there is a problem, 
because one suspects that the causes of atheroma possibly, 
cancer possibly, may lie many years back. A biochemist in 
Ibadan made a speculative suggestion to explain why atheroma 
is so rare in Nigerians: it may be that deficiency of diet in 
childhood is the factor which prevents the preliminary changes 
which, many years afterwards, lead to the development of 
atheroma. If that is the sort of thing we have to look at, then 
the problem of preventing these diseases is going to be very 
long-term indeed, even assuming you could persuade people 
to do the thing which is going to prevent them from becoming ill 
years hence: which Haldane suggested might require compul- 
sion. 
However that may be, there is perhaps a philosophical or 
religious aspect to what Koprowski said; obviously we have to 
live with imperfection, however effectively we may improve 
people by scientific methods. We are left with this residue of 
imperfection to which we have to adapt ourselves and which, of 
course, has been one of the problems for religions through all 
the ages. 
I suppose we could all agree, whatever our fundamental 
beliefs, that it is desirable to have some standard of values upon 
which action can be based, and it is equally desirable to get some 
sort of satisfactory emotional relationship to the nature of things 
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