Willard L. Thorp

Health knows no boundaries.

W HEN I was very young, my proverbial education taught me that if I would only eat an apple a day, it would keep the doctor away; and that if I were early to bed and early to rise, I would become healthy-as well as gain some other desirable characteristics. Of course, a persons health depends in large part on his own behavior. But no regularity of apple-eating nor early-bedding and early-rising, nor any other form of personal invigoration or precaution, is enough. Health is also a community matter, all the way from pure drinking water to protection against epidemics. Today, the community involved is the globe itself. Health is a national and an international problem with a Number One priority. The old forms of snails-pace transportation used to provide a kind of automatic quarantine against communicable diseases. The first ship to go around the world took three years before it returned to Seville in 1522. By 1874, the world had shrunk in time units of distance, so that Jules Vernes travelogue presented a practical 80-day itinerary for global circumnavigation. Today, flying on scheduled commercial airlines, it is possible to circle the earth in 142 hours and 45 minutes, less than six days, weather and machinery permitting. Obviously, the opportunity for exposure to air-borne, water-borne, or man-borne

Statistics and Foreign Policy

Abstract *Presidential address delivered at the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association on December 29, 1947.