Thoughts of a retired physician

  Margan and I host a Current Events group here at our retirement community twice a month. This coming one will be mine to prepare and I chose the little noticed event this month that we now have 8 billion fellow humans as neighbors on our spaceship Earth. That is a lot of humans. When graphed out, the population on Earth looks like this over time: I joined the club in 1948 when the estimated global population was 2.5 billion. It was 4 billion when I graduated from medical school and you can see the rise on the graph since then. I am drawn back to my first microbiology course in 1967 (3.5 billion humans then) and the concept of the bacterial growth curve. If one inoculates a test tube containing appropriate nutrients with a bacterium such as E. coli one can calculate a growth curve that looks like this over several days: Initially the bacteria do nothing spectacular as their metabolism accommodates to the conditions in the tube (lag phase). Then they become active and divide as rapid

  One of the joys of retirement is more time to read books. I always was a bookworm so this is nothing new for me. I still try to keep up with medicine, especially infectious diseases, but the lure of other reading is always there. I wanted to jot down a few recent ones I have read for fun. After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It by Will Bunch was most interesting. Bunch is a Pulitzer Prize winning Philadelphia journalist who explores how we came to believe that the ultimate goal for everyone should be a college diploma. He traces it to the G.I. Bill of 1944 and articulates well how this idea was transmuted over time and became a dividing point in our society. It was interesting to me that Kutztown University occupied one chapter since I began my college education there in the mid-60s. He ends with some interesting ideas about how we can fix this. Universal public service after high school features prominently there.

The midterms are over, at least so far as casting ballots is concerned. Some races remain undecided as ballot counting proceeds in some western states. So what is the outcome? First and foremost, democracy seems to be the main winner. Despite oceans of ink spilled and airwaves filled with political ads (now radiating out to the universe), Donald Trump once again failed the political party he hijacked. It appears the public, including a healthy swath of independent voters, tired at last of his stolen election schtick. He is too much a narcissist and sociopath to admit that but the cracks in the GOP are widening. In two days he will probably announce he is running for President again in 2024. The announcement is probably as much about his fear that he will be indicted for his myriad crimes while in office; he views being a candidate as some sort of talisman that will prevent the law from seeking accountability. We will see. Second, although there were many election deniers that Trump lin

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