October 1960 - Linus Pauling Day-by-Day

THE MOLECULAR THEORY OF CIVILIZATION BY LINUS PAULING

By Linus Pauling

California Library Association, October 5, 1960

The world is made up of matter and radiation. Matter is the part of the world that has restmass; weighs something when it's standing still. Radiation is the part that doesn't weigh anything; in fact, disappears when i's standing still and always moves with the velocity of light; photons and neutrinos - perhaps some other things. Scientists are interested in studying the world; the study of the world in an objective manner is science, and I have been interested in this for many years. I have had the privilege of seeing a very great increase in our knowledge about the nature and structure of the world; how electrons and nuclei are combined together to form atoms and how they work together to form molecules, and so on. Practically all of our precise knowledge of molecular structure has been obtained during my lifetime. Thirty-five years ago it wasn't known that the water molecules H₂O has its two protons, the two hydrogen atoms - ...

This is new information - just about 30 years old, now - and we have information of this sort now for hundreds - even thousands of molecules, including some that make up the human body. Moreover, I have discovered that as I have grown older I have become interested in philosophy - philosophical and ethical questions. Philosophy is the subjective study of the world by man; it involves thinking. For a long time, I hesitated to attack this problem. I felt just about the way that my friend Prof. P.W. Bridgman of Cambridge, of Harvard University, felt and feel. In his recent book he said, "two convictions have been growing upon me; the conviction of importance of a better understanding of the nature and the limitations of our intellectual tools, and the conviction that there is some fundamental ineptness in the way that all of us handle our minds. It becomes more and more impossible for me to read any of the great philosophical works which have excited universal admiration from the time of the early Greeks. My mind simply will not do the things that it is obviously expected to do. The recent Treasury of Philosophy by Dagobert Runes is to me an utterly depressing exhibition of human frailty." Well, I, too, was depressed by the old philosophical writings, but I feel better about them now because I think that I understand what has been going on. I don't think that it is possible to separate philosophy and science; science is a very important part of the world which was closed to the old philosophical writers, and their thinking was restricted for that reason. I have felt better in recent years as I have come to accept this fact and to decide that I had better pay more attention to my own thoughts and to the writings and statements of my contemporaries than to these old fellows.

Well, we have gained a great deal of information about the world, especially during the last few years - the last 50 years - the amount of scientific knowledge doubles every 12 years and this mans a very great increase that has come to us recently. A most surprising development during the last few years is the discovery of the molecular structure of the gene. We know something about what makes human beings what they are; how they pass their characters on to the next generation. This I shan't have time to talk about very much but let me say a word about genes. We know that gene is a molecule of ...; we know this pretty definitely that the pretty big molecule contains perhaps a million atoms. The average gene - a person inherits about 100,000 of them - 50,000 from his father and 50,000 from his mother - even though they are big molecules, as molecules go, and 100,000 is a pretty good sized number, and 3 billion, the number of people in the world, is a pretty large amount. Nevertheless, all of these molecules that have determined the nature of all of the human beings living on earth would, if they were gathered together, be about the size of a pin-head, a cubic millimeter. So that each one of us has inherited an extremely small amount of material, the hundred thousand genes. Moreover, it is known now, I think I can say, it is known now in a reasonably precise way, how the gene manufactures a duplicate of itself. This is the ... structure of the gene. I wish that I had time to talk about it, but there are so many things I want to say that I shall just say that this is an astounding development of the last few years that has changed the thinking of all the scientists in the world, with respect to genetics and evolution. We even are learning something about what molecules do in relation to disease. About a dozen years ago one of my students ... now back in Bethesda, and two or three other people involved with ? how they did the main job, discovered for the first time an abnormal molecule that causes a disease in human beings - a serious disease, sickle cell anemia.

People are born who have inherited two genes - the gene that produces an abnormal hemoglobin molecule instead of the normal hemoglobin molecules that are present in most human being. the hemoglobin molecule - red cells inside the red corpuscles - contains about 10,000 atoms - that's a pretty good sized molecule - and quite a lot, although everything is not known, about its structure. These abnormal sickle cell anemia hemoglobin molecules have about a dozen atoms that are different - out of the 10,000 - that are different from those in normal hemoglobin. These dozen atom abnormalities causes the molecules to stick together so that they clump together to form a sort of crystal inside the red cell in the venous blood and as this crystal growth twists the red cells out of shape, the squeezing destroys it very rapidly and the patient becomes anemic; he leads a life - a short life - of suffering and dies early. About one Negro child in 400 who is born has inherited these two genes and dies of this disease - sickle cell anemia. Now, we come to a clear-cut ethical problem. There are among the people in the world - some millions, many millions, perhaps 20 million - who carry a gene for sickle cell anemia. They have, out of their hundred thousand, one gene that manufactures normal hemoglobin molecules and one that manufactures sickle cell molecules, and in their red cells they have a 50-50 mixture of these two kinds - the normal and abnormal molecules. They get along all right because the normal molecules dilute the abnormal ones enough so that they don't get into trouble; they aren't anemic. But when two of these heterozygotes marry one another, then there occurs the great lottery - the greatest of all lotteries - the child inherits one of the two genes of the father and one of the two genes of the mother; he has a 25% chance of inheriting both of the abnormal genes and of having the disease sickle cell anemia which will cause him to suffer as a child and perhaps through youth and to die; rarely do they live as long as 20, or into the 20's.

We can tell very easily with just a single drop of blood which people carry the abnormal genes and whether two people who have married one another have a 25% chance for each child that they produce, that he will lead this life of suffering. So, what should be done? This gene now is being got rid of; perhaps in a few minutes I'll say why there are so many people who have it; it is being got rid of now, and in the course of ten or 20 generations there will be only half as many people carrying this gene (if the population of the earth stays the constant, it would drop down in half). And after another 10 or 20 generations, to half of that, as the children who inherited the two abnormal genes die without progeny after leading this life of suffering.

Is there any alternative in the purification of the pool of human germ plasm to this process that involves so much human suffering and death? The answer is - the ethical alternative is - that these children not be born. We can tell prospective parents whether or not their children have this 25% chance of being born. I think that the principle of minimum suffering tells us what to do. Man is what he is today because of his power of though, his reason, and I believe that the time has come for him to use this power to decrease the amount of suffering in the world. I believe that these people should be told - when it is discovered that there are two heterozygotes who have married one another - that they should not marry one another. Even if they married someone who isn't a carrier of the gene we might recommend that they have a smaller number than the average number of children because half their children in the case of marriage between a normal person and heterozygote, half the people will also be heterozygotes carrying the defective genes. But if they have married one another, they should not have children, in my opinion. Parents of a sickle cell anemia child should have no further children; they should voluntarily restrict their progeny.

This is a matter of ethics, of philosophy, in the sense that philosophy involves the analysis and clarification of human action and aims, problems and ideas - this the definition that Corliss Lamont gives. Many admirable statements about ethics and philosophy have been made in the past. Dr. Schweitzer has said that we need new thoughts, too, in this field. Aristotle say everyone has a philosophy whether he knows it or not. I think that it is better to follow a philosophy that you have accepted after thought and analysis than one that you have gotten through the accident of circumstance. I think that there is much to be said for the philosophy of Humanism, that the chief end of human life is to work for the happiness of man upon this earth. Humanism is a rational philosophy; it rejects the mysticism and naturalism of the revealed religions. It rejects life after death and the idea that suffering in this world may, for the righteous, be compensated for by the bliss of an afterlife for which we have no evidence other than that of revelation.

Included in this rejection of the supernatural is the rejection of a belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent god who watches over and cares for human beings, interfering with the ordered regularity of events as determined by natural laws sometimes in response to prayer. My own peace of mind has become considerably greater after my accepting the idea that arbitrary action by a supernatural being will not change the course of the world. I believe in law and order, and I'm happy to have law and order in the world. Humanism is the philosophy of service for the good of all humanity, application of new ideas, scientific progress for the benefit of man, human beings now living and those still to be born. I accept humanism in the main, but I feel that it is limited in its emphasis on human beings. Shouldn't we, instead, accept Schweitzer's principle of reverence for life, not just for human beings. In fact, I want to go further and advocate a principle of reverence for the world; reverence for the inanimate as well as the animate part of the world. this is a wonderful world that we live in. Some of its wonders are being annihilated, destroyed as time goes on so that our children's children will never be able to experience them. I do not like to see beautiful crystals of azomite, malachite, chalcotrichite, zumsite (?), rhodochrosite, and so on, removed from the ground and destroyed just to make more copper wire for ICBM's and uranium rods for plutonium reactors.

Instead of the principle of maximizing human happiness, I prefer the principle of minimizing suffering in the world, not only human suffering but all suffering. Now, the difference between these principles involves weighting factors. If we take a scale determined by income, we may select as an origin, an income that just enables people to lead a moderately satisfactory life. then an increase by 80% in this income would increase happiness for the individual to some extent, but a decrease by 80% would cause a great amount of suffering. This is why I put the emphasis on suffering rather than on happiness.

The Sheik of Kuwait has an income of 3 hundred million dollars a year piling up in banks and being used to buy thousands of Cadillacs, some of them gold-plated, and yet he lives there in Kuwait surrounded by poverty and misery, and occasionally builds a school or does something for the welfare of the Arab people. This seems to me to represent misuse - something wrong with our system. I think that truly the path for us to follow, with respect to the gene for sickle cell anemia, is not to allow the millions of children to be born, suffer, and die in order to remove this gene from the pool but to use the alternative method for preventing children from being born. In this matter of birth control, of course, people no longer look to the church for leadership. Long ago, church officials ceased to be the wise men of the community who analyzed world problems and formulated the principles of behavior that would be of greatest benefit to the world. Now the church tends to follow behind the people as the world changes, attempts to preserve the old values - the values that were formulated and were proper values for the world of some thousand or two thousand years ago. Well, there are other genes, too, that we need to do something about - ..., for example - children who have inherited two abnormal genes in place of the normal genes that would manufacture an enzyme in the liver that oxidizes, catalyzes the oxidation of the ... to paraffin in normal human beings. These children have a serious disease that involves mental defect. One percent of the institutionalized cases of mental defect in the country are due to this gene, the gene .... My colleagues under our Ford Foundation project, ... California Institute of Technology, have developed a reliable test for the people who carry this bad gene, and one test, of course, is to have a child, for two people to have a child who is mentally deficient because of ...?. This is the test that shows that each of them carries the gene - one person in 80 carries this gene - each of them carries the gene so they shouldn't have any more children because there's a 25% chance for each succeeding child to be defective in this way. Well, my colleagues have developed a test that will tell whether you carry this gene or not without your having a mentally deficient child. It is not too easy a test but it can be carried out and is pretty reliable. It has been applied. A man who with his first wife who has since died had a ... child wanted to be married again. He brought his fiancée to laboratory, she was investigated and it was found that she did not carry the gene. He was able then to get married with peace of mind knowing that he and his wife would not have a mentally deficient child with ...?.

There are a great many diseases now, thousands of diseases, that cause much suffering in the world that have this cause. Only a few of them are diseases for which it can be predicted ahead of time that a child who will be born will have a 25% or perhaps a 50% chance of having the gene. As work continues to be done, we shall have a better and better knowledge, better and better powers of prediction, and although it is a very difficult problem of how to act in certain simple cases such as those I have described, it is clear what should be done and we can see that man will be able to use his knowledge and powers of reason to decrease the amount of suffering in the world.

Well, how did the world come to be what is its today. We know how it came about and how the human species arose; we know what the process of evolution is. Some two billion years ago there was in the world, produced by photochemical reactions and electrochemical reactions involving high energy, light ? from the sun, lightning, and other causes -- there was io the world a great mass of material that we call organic material -- molecules of all sorts, involving carbon. Then, a self-duplicating molecule arose and started to manufacture duplicates of itself. And 2we understand this process of how a molecule can manufacture duplicates of itself. And we understand this process of how a molecule can manufacture duplicates of itself. More of these were produced and they competed with one another; the best ones won out. This evolution is inevitable. From our knowledge of molecules and their interactions, it is easy for us to see that this would have gone on. The first self-duplicating molecule was in clover -- plenty of spare parts around, all sorts of molecules there, ...? and everything else that it might use to build up the bigger molecules that constituted itself. After a while it may have produced so many duplicates of itself, so much progeny , that one of these important substrate molecules, if used, let's say, as food, became exhausted. Then what happened? One of my colleagues, Prof. Norman Horowitz, in the biology division of the Institute is the man who has clarified this matter and has answered this question. He said -- this is what happened: after a while a cosmic ray or some other mutagenic agent caused one of these many self-duplicating molecules to undergo a mutation such as to permit it to manufacture the missing molecule, the depleted molecule, from other molecules that were present.

For example, Vitamin B₁ consists of two parts -- ? part and the ? part. Some organisms can take ? and ? and put them together to make Vitamin B₁, and others can't, man among them. The original organism presumably to do that and could even manufacture --- Well, perhaps he started out by using ? and ? and then put them together to make Vitamin B₁. As ? and ? became depleted, he ---- Well, perhaps he used the Vitamin B₁, itself to start out. Practically everything must have been present on earth after it had been subjected to these influences for several billion years. When the Vitamin B₁ was depleted, one of these organisms mutated in such a way that it had the power to combine these ? and the ? parts. that was a favorable mutation. And that organism took over the world; the others couldn't compete with it because they were --- their diet was restricted; there wasn't any Vitamin B₁ around; they didn't know how to make it. Well, of course, as time has gone by, some organisms which began to eat other organisms, have lost some of these abilities. The red bread molds, for example, can synthesize all of the 20 ? and man can synthesize only 12 of them, and has to get the other 7 in his food. The ran can synthesize Vitamin C but man has forgotten how, in the process of evolution, and is unable to synthesize Vitamin C. These genes that we have inherited are really remarkable in that they are passed on from generation to generation; they manufacture duplicates of themselves with very few errors. The rate of mutation is such that we are able to say that genes manufacture duplicates of themselves on the average for three million years before a mistake is made. The average gene goes on for something like a hundred thousand generations, producing a duplicate to pass on to the next generation without a mistake until, on the average, once in one hundred thousand generations, three million years. And yet old genes are very stable' we know that they are very stable; a couple of my colleagues working with me, Dr. Jones and Dr. ..., completed a study of the hemoglobin of human beings and of animals. The hemoglobin molecules contain about ten thousand atoms. The gorilla hemoglobin molecule and the chimpanzee hemoglobin molecule differ from human hemoglobin molecules by a barely detectable amount -- something like a half-dozen atoms out of ten thousand. the orangutan hemoglobin is somewhat more different - a dozen or twenty atoms out of ten thousand. And then as you go down to horse and pig -- we don't know yet that it's a much bigger difference -- to fish -- still a bigger difference but some similarity -- and to a worm ..., local beach worm here, there you find very little resemblance. From this we can conclude that gene for hemoglobin has been essentially the same for a long time -- long before the time when human beings and gorillas and orangutans became separate evolutionary lines. Well, pretty soon, I think, from studies of this sort, we shall know much more about the nature of human beings and other animals than we know now.

And I think we'll know more about human beings; about the thinking power of human beings. there was a great mutation, favorable mutation, that occurred, it is estimated, 700,000 years ago when the brain, the power, the genes that determine the size of the brain mutated in such a way that the brain increased in size greatly, double in size between the precursor or man and man. Man had, then, become what we would call man with great powers of thinking 700,000 years ago. These new powers -- powers of thought, memory, imagination, and soon of communication as he learned to talk through use of the low human being -- have been of the greatest importance in the evolution of civilization. I don't know yet just what the nature of the change in molecule of acid that was responsible for this astounding step in the process, the molecular process of evolution of civilization. We don't, in fact, know very much about thinking in relation to molecules. The brain is, of course, made up of molecules; we are surprisingly ignorant of their chemical nature; we have 1 and a few others that have been studied and are characteristic of the brain and nerve tissue; something is known about their structure; something is known about the detailed structure of nerve fibers and of the process of conduction along nerves, but there is very little about thinking or memory.

Did you know that there are two kind of memory; one is ephemeral memory which is also consciousness and the other is long-term memory. I think there is little doubt that ephemeral memory is electrical in nature -- involves an electrical pattern in the brain, lasting something like ten minutes. Permanent memory is material in nature -- a structural pattern of protein molecules and other molecules that has been laid down in the brain with the evidence -- well, there's much evidence -- about ephemeral memory; for example, people who got a blow on the head that makes them unconscious often have forgotten, can't remember after wards things that happened in the preceding ten minutes. Say, their memories for that period had not yet been permanently laid down -- were only electrical and destroyed by the blow. People have Korotkov (?) disease, Korotkov syndrome, can only remember things about ten minutes. This is a sort of protein starvation that accompanies extreme alcoholism; they are no longer synthesizing proteins and can't produce the material pattern -- a new material pattern -- in the brain; they can remember things for ten minutes -- roughly ten minutes. A man with Korotkov syndrome can go downtown and do some business -- buy something at the store and come back -- if he carries a card with him that he can look at which tells him every few minutes what he is supposed to be doing and where he is to go -- that sort of thing.

Well, I am very much interested in the matter of what is going on in the brain; what are the molecules doing; what are the electrical waves doing; what is the nature of the interaction between the electrical pattern that is involved in these electrical oscillations involved in consciousness and ephemeral memory and the structural pattern that constitutes permanent memory. Three months ago I had nearly finished a paper which I thought was extremely interesting, to me, anyway, on the molecular theory of general anesthesia. Well, this is related, general anesthesia, which is, you know, involving taking ether or something like that to become unconscious, -- general anesthesia is something that is related to the process of thinking, encephalic activity nd the interaction of the brain with molecules of bi-ethyl (?) ether or some other anesthetic agent. I haven't been able to get back to work on that and I hope that I'll get that manuscript finished and published before long and that in the course of years scientists will learn, as I'm sure they will, and I hope I'll be one of them, will learn something more about molecules in relation to thinking. Well, this looks very important so that the brain doubled in size 700,000 years ago and that man had increased ability to think and in particular to pass information on to other people. What this did was, this mutation permitted the inheritance of acquired characteristics for the first time -- you know, rats who have their tails cut off have baby rats that grow tails and no matter how long you continue cutting off the tails of rats before they have ? the tailless characteristic is not past formed. It'll be ... occasionally by mutation but independently of whether the rat has had its tail cut off or not, or the dog or Cocker spaniel, or something. But, we learned how to carry on this process of inheritance of required characteristics through communication.

Somebody, some smart fellow, a long time ago learned how to use, to make a bow and arrow -- and he was able -- he didn't have to wait for the mutation for making bows and arrows to arrive by accident in his germ plasm, perhaps waiting a million years for such a complicated mutation. He was able to tell his friends and his children how to make bows and arrows. This what has led to civilization; it was the gene that produced the increase in the size of the brain -- that permitted us to make this extraordinary step above that -- beyond the abilities of any other animals to pass information of acquired characteristics on to our progeny. Now, something has happened as a result of this; a man, or a woman, or a child in the world today is not an organism in the sense that a rabbit i s-- or a lion, or a whale. He is something different; he is a part of a greater organism -- the whole of mankind -- into which he is bound by the means of communication -- telegraph wires, transportation to just plain things along telephones, newspapers -- the means of communication in the ways that the cells of an individual rabbit are bound together by the nerve fibers and the hormonal messengers that course through the blood stream. We have to recognize now that this step in evolution has been taken for mankind. It has made this great organism the matter of the earth, but this great organism, mankind, is still infantile, immature, somewhat feeble-minded, schizophrenic, its left hand fights against its right instead of cooperating with it and working for the good of the whole. We have now to take the next step in the evolution of civilization of humanity -- we must achieve the mutation that will bring SANITY to this great organism -- the organism that is human kind.

What is the nature of the mutation that is needed? Well, there might occur a mutation in the genes of the pool of human germ plasm; such a germatic mutation ..., for example, some sort of extrasensory perception might do the job -- but I think we don't have time for this process to be effective because evolution by mutation of genes is very slow -- one mutation in three million years per gene. We may hope that the mutation which will occur in the nature of this great organism will be a mutation in the means of communication among human beings that will transfer to the organism some of the desirable and admirable attributes that are already possessed by the units of which it is composed -- individual human beings. These attributes are SANITY and MORALITY.

We have trouble getting the laws passed that will protect the citizen; often these harmful products are pushed by misleading advertising -- a hormonal face cream rejuvenates the skin, $15 per jar, despite the carcinogenic substances; it is known that these thyroid sex hormones can be carcinogenic. But of course worst of all are the cigarettes -- I'm not going to take much time about cigarettes, although cigarettes, as I said in a lecture I gave at the Institute last year, are the principle cause of the shortening of life expectancy by Americans. If we were to get complete control of cancer, Americans would live 2 years and 8 months longer. If we were to stop smoking cigarettes, completely, Americans on the average would live 4 years longer. The Americans who smoke cigarettes would live about eight years longer; smoking cigarettes at the rate of one pack a day ages so that at the age of 50 or 55 your physiological age is eight years greater than that of non-smokers. Non-smokers, of course, aren't harmed very much -- they have to smell the smoke that smokers produce but it's just a few days decrease in life expectancy, perhaps, not much more. Well, I think that there are about 6 billion dollars a year spent by Americans on cigarettes and about one billion dollars on advertising. I was shocked last year when I was giving the lectures at Cornell all over the campus there were big posters -- TAKE PART IN THE CONTEST -- and the Cornell Daily Sun carried the big advertisement -- HEY GANG: JUST A REMINDER TO BUY CAMEL, WINSTON, SALEM CIGARETTES AND SAVE THE EMPTY WRAPPERS -- YOUR HOUSE OR DORM CAN BE THE WINNER IF YOU TURN IN THE LARGEST NUMBER OF WRAPPERS. GET THAT SATISFYING FLAVOR -(-AND LUNG CANCER, TOO-)- WHICH HOUSE ON CAMPUS WILL HAVE THE SHORTEST LIFE EXPECTANCY? When will the United States, like Great Britain, put on a campaign to keep young people from smoking. this has been going on in Britain now for a half dozen years. Well, nations are immoral, too -- national governments, all of them. Aristotle asked, "Can a moral man represent his nation?" The answer is "No," because nations are immoral -- a powerful nation attacks a weaker one if it thinks it can benefit itself nearby; militarism is immoral; patriotism - confusing the young about a very important matter - is incompatible with true morality -- this extreme national patriotism.

One sort of immorality that we've come to accept is that associated with military secrecy. I don't need to give you examples; you read about them all the time in the papers. There's a young man, Herman (Kohn) Cahn of the Rand Corporation, who is going around the country giving lectures propagandizing for increase in the military budget. He advocates building bomb shelters and other acts of this sort. In the lecture, when he is asked a question that relates to something that he knows about is secret, he says that you don't have to lie very much but you do have to look people in the eye and think up things that are just not true. That is the difference in morality between the government and the non-government. Well, I think that we may be happy that nations are going to be forced now—are forced now—to be moral and to give up the great immorality of war. The existence of bombs, weapons, stockpiles in the world that can destroy the whole world so that if there were a war the United States would be completely destroyed; practically every American killed—I can't predict what would happen. Would 5 million, or 20 million, or 25 million Americans remain alive? And approximately an equal number of Russians—depends upon how vigorously the war is fought; we have enough weapons— and they have—to kill everybody in these countries and most people in the rest of the world, too, and yet there's plenty of activity by people who want to continue the cold war--speed up the cold war—and some of them obviously are interested in the cold war profits, there's no doubt about that. A short while ago I saw in the New York Timesa big article—U.S. ARMS MAKERS ARE POURING CAPITAL INTO WEST GERMANY; THE EXPERIENCE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR, THE SECOND WORLD WAR HELPED THEM ENOUGH. Morality has to win out in the world now. Survival now means survival of the whole human organism; it depends upon whether or not we can work for the common good. The old evolutionary method—Survival of the fittest—is no longer significant. That will be a little later when we come into contact with other planets with intelligent life, but so far as the world, the earth, is concerned, it is no longer significant. We need to make use of a new ethical principle, a new "Golden Rule"—do unto others 20% better than you would have them do unto you in order to make up for subjective error. But the golden rule that the diplomats have used from time immemorial is do unto others 20% worse than you would have them do unto you in the hopes that you can get away with it; you can always con¬fuse the public about it anyway. I think that this new golden rule is being used in the negotiations that have been carried on for nearly two years now in Geneva towards the formulation of a bomb-test agreement. I think that this is the most important activity in the world today, making this first of a series of agreements --international agreements—that in the course of time will be to peace -- permanent peace -- to disarmament -- total and universal disarmament -- with the best possible systems of control and inspection. Ambassadors Wadsworth, Zarotkin, and Wright have, day after day for nearly two years, negotiated with one another with no mutual recriminations or vituperations but in a sensible and straight-forward way -- occasionally a harsh word or two just to prove to the governments back home that they were doing their job, I think; they like one another—Ambassador Wadsworth, I'm sorry, in one way to say, is no longer there; he is our ambassador at the United Nations, but perhaps we'll benefit by that—I think he's pretty good, really very good -- and Steller, I don't know. I think that the ethical principles that human beings believe to be fine will be accepted by the nations of the world that are going to be forced to accept them and that this great organism that constitutes the whole of humanity will be a moral, and sane, and ethical organism accepting the principles of behavior that guide and are accepted by individual human beings. I believe that we can then, as the culmination of the great process of evolution, move together into a world of the future, a world of peace and morality and ever-increasing happiness.