Newsletter
A M ERIC A N ASSOCIATION OF PHY SICIST S IN ME D I CI NE VOLUME 33 NO. 5
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008
AAPM President’s Column
Gerald A. White Colorado Springs, CO
T
here is an old joke that came to mind as I thought about how I would structure this month’s column. A cement mason has completed a new sidewalk and is standing on his client’s front porch when he notices a group of children playing in the newly finished product. He bellows a long and loud string of epithets and the woman who owns the house chastises him: “ Please, these are only children, have you no regard for them?” to which he replies: “My dear woman, I have great love for children in the abstract, but not in the concrete.” “Landmark”, like “concrete”, offers us the opportunity to contrast (or confuse) the conceptual with the physical, and “landmark” is a word that has been, for me, a focus of rumination since the Houston meeting. Unknown to all but two of the attendees and companions at the meeting, the AAPM 50th was not the only anniversary being remembered. Ten years prior during the last week of July, my wife Cathy and I set out from Florence, Oregon on our
tandem bicycle headed to Yorktown, Virginia. It was a trip filled with landmarks of the concrete kind; Hells Canyon, Yellowstone, Hoosier Pass, water towers of Kansas towns that seemed to recede as we tried to approach, the mammoth hills of Missouri............ . There were also landmarks of the abstract sort; the first crossing of the continental divide that gave us confidence for the next six, the first of many encounters with helpful strangers, learning to match our need for food with the offerings of tiny stores (never read the ingredient list on a packaged Little Debbie Honey Bun). I had the clear feeling that the 50th in Houston had both the concrete and noetic flavors of landmarks. The ever present reminders of the 50 years of history, the pins, banners, history symposia, the charter member reception and the dancers in poodle skirts all provided a concrete temporal landmark for setting our bearings as to where we have been, where we are now. As I reflected on the banquet I had difficulty placing it squarely in either the physical or abstract category. Cleary we were all there physically, but it seemed more than just a gathering to mark the time and place. I had the feeling that it was an entry into the next period of the life of the AAPM and our life with the organization. There were spirits of both formality and collegiality that are difficult to obtain in both temporal and physical simultaneity (exemplified perhaps by
the serving of 3000 bowls of soup at the beginning of the meal, each one warm.) The organization has grown from a hundred or so to nearly 7000 and, until the Houston meeting I had difficulty seeing how the nearly familial relationships among the early AAPM members would transform into the connections among so many of us now. For me, at least the meal shared by 3000 of us was a landmark, a sign that it could be done. We have moved into a new phase of AAPM, a large, nationally recognized institution of course, but also one in which we see ourselves as organizationally serious, setting the course of both the science and the profession of Medical Physics and committing the (see White p. 4) TABLE OF CONTENTS Chair of the Board’s Column Executive Director’s Column Editor’s Column 50th Anniversary Wrap-up Professional Council Report Education Council Report Website Editor’s Column Fellowships, Residencies & Research Awards Working Group Update Ed Council Wkshop Report AAPM Remembrances ACR Accreditation Health Policy/Economics Chapter News ISEP Course Report Task Group Updates Coolidge Award Speech Person in the News Memorial
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