Comment

It is a policy of this journal that, with their permission, any sufficiently interesting exchange of comments between author and Editor or author and referees may be published along with the paper in the way discussion of papers is presented at symposia. Here, it was Dr. Henry K. Beecher, as author of the editorial, who requested that the correspondence between himself and the Editor be printed. In deference to Dr Beecher, the Editor, to his delight, had to swallow his private modesty for the public benefit since Dr. Beecher was kind enough to say that there were sections of his letter “in which for the first time you gave me a rational way of thinking about the major unsolved problem dealt with here.” Those sections follow.