Thoughts of a retired physician

  When I worked for the Emmes Corporation, one of my duties was to present orientation lectures to new employees. The lectures involved such things as research ethics and the history of the regulation of pharmaceutical products. I discussed how the regulation of drugs began and how the Food and Drug Administration came to be. We went from a Wild West concept where caveat emptor was the rule to a regulated industry where experts employed by the FDA (along with advisory boards of outside experts) reviewed data to ensure that efficacy and safety were present in anything that was allowed to reach the market. That prevailed until yesterday, 7 April 2023, when a federal judge with zero expertise in medicine and pharmacology issued an ideologically driven decision to remove a drug from the market which was approved 23 years ago. The federal district judge who made the ruling that the FDA should remove its approval of mifepristone , Matthew J. Kacsmaryk , is a long-time foe of abortion. As

  Photography has always fascinated me. My parents bought me a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye box camera when I was 8. The link will show you what it looked like and also its performance parameters, which were limited, to say the least. I remember using it indoors at the Smithsonian shortly after I got it. Thankfully, my horrible shots are now safely at the bottom of some landfill in Berks County! But it sparked an interest in doing better. My brother brought back a Konica 35 mm single lens reflex (SLR) camera when he returned from the Navy and gave it to me in high school. Now I could play with shutter and aperture settings and different film speeds. It was all trial and error but I slowly got better and in the days of film, I mostly shot color slides. I finally bought a Canon AE-1 after I joined the Navy. This was a very popular entry-level SLR at the time (Canon discontinued it in 1984) but it was solid and my photography improved a little bit more. Margan and I used it and her SLR (I think