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Blood, some day, will be provided for by, I believe, artificially. There's some research going on in that now. And that, of course, would solve the problem--because the quantity would be easy to control. We get blood now, in New York City, from Europe, and if you see some of the conditions of blood collection over there, it doesn't make you feel very happy about using blood that comes from a foreign country.

I saw a very interesting program recently, dealing with the politics of blood collection. It was a program about African-American children with leukemia, and the difficulty of finding compatible donors in the major blood banks--because traditionally it's been very hard to get African-Americans to give blood, because of an understandable antipathy towards the medical system that wouldn't treat them in hospitals. I wondered if any of those issues ever came up during your tenure.

Oh, yes. Certainly. Sure.

Could you talk a little bit about that?

Those were handled much more at the local level, and I didn't get into those myself. That was handled by George Elsey, and he had--and still has--a very sophisticated scientific group, centrally. But the politics of blood is a serious matter. Worse today than it was when I was there, not only because of AIDS, but because of the whole resurgence of--the whole thrust of the Afro-American representation, and for that matter the representation of other groups. So, no, it's a--you could write a book about that.