According to a recent theory, schizophrenia is confined to people with a particular genetic predisposition and the disorder arises from a specific breakdown in the central part of the system that controls growth (Burch 1964, 1968). We call diseases of this general class autoaggressive. Their pathogenesis has two distinctive phases: initiation and development. Initiation, which is a purely random process, entails a form of spontaneous somatic gene mutation in growth-control stem cells.