Things have gotten better.

I remember summers in Rochester, NY, when I was growing up. They were different from the summers my children and grandchildren have experienced.

As the summer advanced parents began to keep a closer eye on their kids. Not because of any fear they might be molested. It was a virus that terrified both kids and parents.

Everybody knew the symptoms of polio. Kids and parents were scared of permanent braces or life in an iron lung. Public swimming pools closed during the "polio season."

Well, no longer. Things have gotten better.

When I was younger, one used to hear the term "exploratory surgery" quite often. Today, we ask patients to lie down and slide into a hollow tube for a CAT scan. Things have gotten better.

When I was teaching physics, I often used medical imaging as an example when some politician raged against a seemingly silly research project.

"It's doubtful," I would say, "that if you were in charge of funding medical research, you would chose to spend taxpayer money researching the results of slamming high-speed electrons into pieces of metal, but that research produced X-rays and began the march of non-invasive medical imaging."

Today, I'm thinking about the people of Galveston, Texas. When they went to bed on the evening of September 7, 1900, they had no idea that more than 8,000 of them would die the next day in a hurricane that would become the greatest natural disaster ever to hit the USA.

They had absolutely no idea it was coming.

As I write this, we know that a hurricane of possibly historic proportions is moving up the east coast. We watch it on radar on the nightly news. We see it from space on the Weather Channel. Reasonably reliable computer models tell us where it's headed.

I have people I care about in the path of this storm. You probably do too. Unlike the people of Galveston our loved ones have plenty of warning. They have the time to protect both life and property.

Things have gotten better.