Antarctic Anecdotes

  Dear Mom and Dad: Greetings from Summer Camp.   I mean Winter Camp.   I mean Day Camp, because the whole year is just one single day.   Anyway, my cabin counselor said we all had to write to our parents tonight.   How are you?   I am fine. I would like to say that I’m spending my time engaged in serious clinical work in support of the National Science Foundation’s mission in Antarctica.   However, since you’ve been my folks for lo these sixty years, you would know that my attention span, while good when needed, drifts elsewhere at the first opportunity to do so.   As does this letter. It may surprise you to learn that not everything we do at the Pole is in pursuit of knowledge and learning.   There’s plenty of down time, and one can only contemplate time, geography, climate, the cosmos, and how to work the World’s Oldest Betamax Machine so much before your mind longs to do something less taxing.   The small numbers of us here o...

  (Gentle reader:   This piece is a bit out of sequence…it should have come just after my arrival the Pole but, to be honest, I forgot I wrote this while cooped up in quarantine.   Kind of like how you forget bad relationships or time in a Turkish prison.   “Have you ever been in a Turkish prison, Bobby?” - Captain Clarence Over.)    During my forays into public health, I came to understand that an epidemic within a closed population is a double-edged sword.   On one hand, one wants to prevent illness and death wherever it’s possible to do so.   On the other, if you have a captive audience you can prevent disease spread to the rest of the population through aggressive measures, even though it increases the risk to already infected persons.   An easy way to think about this is to recall that the island of Molokai in Hawaii was originally a leper colony.   The idea was that by sending lepers to an isolated island, they might eventually d...