Cities in Flight James Blish

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failures of the central nervous system, in muscular dystrophy, and so on, and
so on. It began to look very much as though we'd exchanged a devil we knew for
a devil we didn't.
"So there was quite a long search for a possible infectious origin for each of
the degenerative diseases. Because some animal tumors, like poultry sarcoma,
are caused by viruses, a lot of people set to work hunting like mad for
all kinds of cancer viruses. There was a concerted attempt to implicate a
group called the pleuropneumonia-like organisms as the cause of the arthritic
diseases. The vascular diseases, like hypertension and thrombosis, got blamed
on everything from your diet to your grandmother. - -
"And it all came to very little. Oh, we did find that some viruses did cause
some types of cancer, leukemia among them. The PPLO group does cause a type of
arthritis, too, but only the type associated with a venereal disease called
essential urethritis. And we found that the commonest -of the three types of
lung cancer was being caused by the radio-potassium content of tobacco smoke;
it was the lip and mouth cancers that were caused by the tars. But for the
most part, we found out just what we had known before-that the degenerative
diseases weren't infectious. We'd already been down that dead end.
"About there was when Pfitzner got into the picture. The NHS, the National
Health Service, got alarmed enough about the rising incidence-curves to call
the first really major world- congress on the degenerative - diseases. The
U.S. paid part of the bill because the armed services were getting nervous
about the rising rate of draft rejections."
"I heard some talk about that part of it," Paige said. "It started right in my
own service. A spaceman only has about ten years of active life; after that
he's given garrison duty somewhere-so- we like to catch 'em young. And even
then we were turning back a huge proportion of young volunteers for 'diseases
of old age'-incipient circulatory disease in most cases. The kids were
shocked; most of them had never suspected any such thing, they felt as healthy
as bulls, and in tIle usual sense I suppose they were-but not for space
flight."
"Then you saw one of the key factors very early," Anne said. "But it's no
longer a special problem of the Space Service alone. - It's old stuff to all
the armed services' medical departments now; at the time the NHS stepped in,
the overall draft rejection rate for 'diseases of old age' was about 10 per
cent for men in their early twenties. Anyhow, the result of the congress was
that the U.S. Department of Health, Welfare and Security somehow got a
billion-dollar appropriation for a real mass attack on the degenerative
diseases. In case you drop zeros as easily as I do, that was about half what
had been spent to produce
the first atomic bomb. Since then, the appropriation has been added to once,
and it's due foi~ renewal again now.
"Pfitzner holds the major contract on that project, and we're well enough
staffed and equipped to handle it so that we've had to do very little
sub-contracting. We simply share the appropriation with three other producers
of biologicals, two of whom are producers only and so have no hand in the
research; the third firm has done as -much research as we have, but we
know-because this is supposed to be a co-ordinated effort with sharing of
knowledge among the contractors-that they're far gone down another blind
alley. We would have told them so, but after one look at what we'd found, the
government decided that the fewer people who know about it, the better. We
didn't mind; after all, we're in business to make a profit, too. But that's
one reason why you saw so many government people on our necks this aft�rnoon."
The girl broke off abruptly and delved into her pocketbook, producing a fiat
compact which she opened and inspected intently. Since she wore almost no
make-up, it was hard to imagine the reason for the sudden examination; but
after a brief, odd smile at one corner of her mouth, she tucked the compact
away again. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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