Alan E. Nourse - The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse, Karl Swanson

for diabetes, up from 37 percent just ten years earlier. Looking into the future, Heinz quietly predicted that, as a result of medical intervention in detecting and treating diabetes, as much as 85 percent of the population would be carrying some diabetic factors within another forty years, and that some 42 percent would be actively diabetic. His message was simple and to the point: keep treating diabetes the way it had been treated for three quarters of a century and everybody would be diabetic or diabetes-prone by the late part of the next century.
    When news reporters picked up the story and accused Heinz of doom-singing and rabble-rousing, the man merely withdrew, refusing to discuss his work any further. He had evolved complex biomathematical equations predicting the spiraling incidence of the disease; he knew his findings were valid; but he had no solutions to offer. Inevitably his reticence was interpreted to mean that he was concealing something, and soon he was the focus of alarming newspaper headlines: DOOMSDAY SCIENTIST REFUSES COMMENT ON WORK!
    CAN DIABETES BE STOPPED? TOP EXPERT WON'T TALK! As the storm raged Heinz withdrew still further, extending his studies to mental illness, ulcer disease, hypertension, cancer—the whole spectrum of illness that had been affected by medical intervention over the past centuries. And in each of these areas he found the overall occurrence of these diseases steadily increasing as a direct result of medical interference with age-old natural balances.
    Of course, it was all only theory, the uncorroborated findings of one man working in a field of science that was inexact at best. For all of the scare headlines, Heinz's predictions might still have been ignored except for the interest of Charles Lafferty, a young sociologist eager to find a way around the grim pattern that Heinz had forecast. Working at Stanford, Lafferty began collaborating with Heinz to develop certain "solution constructs" that might be used to turn the course of history and prevent or minimize the medical and social disasters that Heinz's work predicted. Almost immediately the federal government classified this work as top secret and provided money for the development of a practical Eugenics Control program to curb the transmission of genetically linked diseases, even as the Secretary of Health Control and other official spokesmen were publicly scoffing at Heinz's predictions and denying the implications of his work. But within months Heinz and Lafferty reached a startling and unpalatable conclusion: that a eugenics program alone would not be enough to turn the tide. Even with compulsory sterilization of all victims of diabetes, schizophrenia and a dozen other heredity-connected diseases and the compulsory euthanasia of all identifiably defective babies, the destructive spiral would continue as long as widespread medical intervention continued. Only if all individuals who wished to have medical treatment were first sterilized was there hope that the spiral could be broken.
    It was this staggering concept that Heinz and Lafferty finally settled upon as a tentative working approach. Eugenics control—weeding out defective genes—and a diminishment of medical intervention had to be inextricably tied together. Health care, in the form of government-run, tax-supported clinics, hospitals and medical staffs would continue to be available throughout the land, providing a high quality of medical care to every citizen, from cradle to grave, who could qualify. And qualification for that medical care would be simple and easy to achieve: the only requirement for treatment of any ailment would be that the patient first be sterilized. Those who wished to have children would, of course, be free to do so—at the sacrifice of any type of legal medical care. Once such a program was instituted, Heinz and Lafferty predicted, the economic crisis centering on health care delivery would be relieved almost immediately, and the