Category: Uncategorized
-
Thursday’s Child
When my first child was born at 5:24 am on September 20, 2001, he just missed being “Thursday’s child.” As a human-interest story, a Nashville TV station ran a news feature profiling the family of the first baby born each Thursday. At first, I was a little disappointed—Kendrick was perfect, and I wanted to show…
-
Tip of the Spear
August 10th is Agent Orange Awareness Day in recognition of that day in 1961 when the U.S. began aerial spraying of herbicides in Vietnam. More than 50 years after the use of Agent Orange ended, this chemical continues to impact veterans and their families as well as multiple generations of Vietnamese. This past March, on…
-
Moments
There are moments in life that stay with you forever. Sometimes their significance goes unnoticed when they are happening, and it is only later when you realize the memory of that moment has wormed its way into your soul and will never let go. For me, one of those moments came in 1975 in the…
-
Unintended Consequences
During the early days of World War II, four groups of scientists, two in the U.S. and two in Great Britain, were independently working to identify herbicides that could be used to boost production of food crops by eliminating weeds that depleted the soil or crowded out the desired plants (1). As the war dragged…
Biomedical Prose 