We all recognize that in recent decades, many important achievements have helped create a cleaner, healthier environment, yet our national needs in environmental health are not being fully met.

I completed medical school at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in 1984.

I decided I wanted to be a physician when I was seven years old.

One of the biggest challenges to medicine is the incorporation of information technology in our practices.

The infrastructure for linking environmental health and public health is not working as well as it should.

There is no doubt that environmentally related diseases will continue to pose problems in the future.

Unless physicians stand together to fight threats and injustices, our practices cannot remain viable in the future.

As population susceptibilities are better understood, we will be in a better position than we are in today to make informed decisions about risk management.

I am also actively involved in my church and its community activities. We have programs to improve the lives of our congregation and programs of outreach in the community.

I spent some time at White Memorial Medical Center as a senior medical student doing a rotation in surgery; however, I felt I wasn't getting enough time assisting.

I would like the Medical Society to be one of the resources for information about the influences that have an impact on our patients and our practices.

I would like to promote the concept of a partnership of insurance companies, physicians and hospitals in deploying a basic framework for an electronic medical records system that is affordable.

I would say to young physicians that the more you intentionally improve the lives of the people in the community you serve the better your life will be and the greater your value will be to the community.

It is important to consider whether the sample size selected by the Environmental Genome Project will provide sufficient power to discover most alleles relevant to gene-environment interactions.

Moreover, environmental health at the local level has become narrowly focused, very much defined around regulations and the attendant regulatory debates.

One of the responsibilities faced by the Environmental Genome Project is to provide the science base upon which society can make better informed risk management decisions.

There was an opening in the ER program at King Drew, so I spent the next month there, fascinated with the range of pathology that I observed, the diversity of skill that the ER physicians had to acquire, the variety of cases, and the ability to interact closely with people.

To maximize our potential to enhance our health and our knowledge, we should remain open to new understanding and evolving technology or resources that might inspire a change in our approach to these important questions.

While the Environmental Genome Project does not seek to assign allele frequencies, we are aware of the importance of accurate allele frequency estimates for future epidemiologic studies and the large sample sizes such estimates will require.