Menopause: it had to be the gods' ironic warning to(or just plain nasty trick on) humanity for having artificially extended the life span, she told herself for the nth time. A mere hundred years ago, the average life span was less than fifty, and any woman who went on living twenty or thirty years past the end of her menstruation was an oddity. The difficulty of continuing to live with tissues for which the ovaries or the thyroid had ceased to secrete the normal supply of hormones; the possible relationship between the postmenopausal decrease in estrogen levels and the incidence of Alzheim these were not questions worth troubling one's mind over. of far more importance to the majority of mankind was the challenge of simply obtaining enough food to eat each day. Had the advancement of medicine, then, done nothing more than to expose, subdivide, and further complicate the problems faced by the human species? Soon another announcement came over the PA system. In English this time. If there is a doctor on board, please identify yourself to one of the cabin attendants.