The small farm towns have been economic wastelands for decades, economically and socially devastated by the loss of the family farms, now being cash cropped by non-local entrepreneurs or lying fallow, posted and used two weekends a year by employed suburbanites who wish they could live in the country. Minimum income jobs have attracted a massive influx of Hispanics willing to work hard and cheap for an opportunity to get established in America. In several small cowtowns, Hispanics already outnumber the remnants of the immigrant European population and locals refer to their towns as "Little Mexico." For better or worse, America remains a melting pot.

The main streets of many larger farm towns look like skid row retail districts. Where there used to be viable mom and pop shops, clothing stores, shoe stores, hardware stores, appliance stores and restaurants, there are now boutiques, arts and crafts stores and antique shops, so marginal as to be unable to afford a decent shingle to cover the holes left by removing the old Gambles™ and Sears™ signs. This is the result of half a century of greed-driven capitalism, the values of which are inconsistent with nourishing agriculture, the people or the environment.

Dr. Lower received his formal education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1964 to 1971, when he joined the Faculty of the Department of Human Oncology at UW Medical School. His clinical research provided the conceptual foundations of Molecular Epidemiology, as a unique approach to establishing causation of the human cancers and determining relative human susceptibility to chemical mutagens. In 1982, he provided the conceptual foundations of the Mutation Theory of Neoplastic Disease.

His mentor at UW-Madison was Dr. Van Rensselaer Potter, a pioneering experimental oncologist and the father of Bioethics (1970) and Global Bioethics (1988). Essentially an extension of Aldo Leopold's scientific ethics into the medical realm, Bioethics has been extended by Dr. Lower into the sociocultural realm, where Jeffersonian Democracy resides at the core.

Last year, 2002, Dr. Lower was invited by the Ukrainian Association for Bioethics to present several lectures to the faculty of the Kiev Medical Academy. There, he provided a logical derivation of the values of science, democracy and nascent Christianity to open-eyed audiences.

Free from Soviet "superpower" oppression, the Ukrainian people are experiencing a cultural rebirth and they are looking to the values and principles of democracy for guidance. They see little help from the world's only remaining "superpower." The Ukrainian people have had their fill of superpowers and are more than able to govern themselves, as are we all.

Dr. Lower currently resides south of Keystone, South Dakota, about 2 miles east of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, on the edge of Black Elk Wilderness Area in the Black Hills. He has occassion to see Thomas Jefferson on a daily basis.

Thomas is one very disappointed but understanding man.