Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

We study the effect of a possible fourth heavy generation of fermions on the Higgs sector of the standard model. We show, from the violation of elastic unitarity, that the scale of strong interactions is well below 1 TeV even with a Higgs mass as low as 500 GeV provided the fourth generation fermion mass is equal or larger than the Higgs mass. The diagonal Pade approximant method is then used to unitarize the partial wave amplitudes. It is found that, for the fourth generation fermion masses which are comparable to or larger than the Higgs mass, the Landau ghosts in the I=0 and I=2 channels of the reconstructed amplitudes move too close to the physical region to be accepted.