Retirement Phobia
figure A figure B figure C
by VASUDEVA IYER , MD
Pursuing a solo clinical practice has become a major burden , thanks to the ever-changing rules and regulations , dwindling payments by the health insurance companies and the skyrocketing overhead expenses . The mounting pressure posed by such forces has been pushing solo medical practitioners to seriously consider retirement . As someone who has spent more than 50 years in medical teaching / clinical practice , I find that the thoughts of retirement provoke significant anxiety . Also , the question of what to do after retirement has also been a major deterrent . Many of my colleagues seem to have found profound happiness in pursuits like golf , woodwork , gardening , culinary arts , music or by indulging in activities like “ playing ” the stock market , watching movies and being creative at the workshop in the basement ; regrettably , I have no such hobby to look forward to .
While brooding over the perils of retirement over the long Memorial Day weekend , I started perusing the personal photographs that my computer diligently shows up each day . I was thrilled to see the old pictures of flowers that I had photographed in the sunroom more than a decade ago . I had forgotten all about them and even of the thorny plant ( crown of thorns , Eurphorbia Milii ) bearing them ; the plant has been dead for several years . I distinctly remember the challenges the flowers posed , elusive of a rational explanation for the peculiar mix of colors . I looked at the pictures and wondered again how to explain the genetic basis of such phenotypic heterogeneity of the flowers in the same plant and often in the same stem . Here are three photographs : Figure A with all four flowers in red , Figure B with two pink , one white and one with a petal mostly white but with a pink sector , and Figure C with pink flowers with white sectors in two petals . I revisited the Mendelian rules to explain the phenotypes but struggled quite a bit with the process . While the red is the dominant and white is the recessive trait , one must assume that codominance to explain the pink flowers . Explaining the white flowers with pink sector and pink flower with white sectors is more challenging to me but may be child ’ s play for the geneticist .
I have always been attracted to the history of medicine , and I can ’ t help talking about the great Johann Gregor Mendel , considered the father of Genetics . He was born 200 years ago in Hyncice , in the Maverian-Silesian region of the current Czech Republic . He became an Augustinian monk and continued his education at the University of Vienna , excelling in physics and mathematics . His famous experiments were done using pea plants , crossbreeding them by transferring pollen with a paint brush . He studied several generations of these plants concentrating on seven specific traits including smooth vs . wrinkled seeds , yellow vs . green seed , purple vs . white flower , tall vs . short stem length , etc .
Mendel showed that the first generation ( F1 ) after crossbreed resembled one or the other parent , not a blend of the two . Some traits were dominant and always appear in F1 , but recessive traits often appeared in subsequent generations . He formulated the laws of dominance , segregation and independent assortment to explain his findings . He published his data in 1866 as “ Experiments in Plant Hybridization ” 1 long before the discovery of DNA . The Mendel
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