Today’s guest post comes from Dr. Larry Kyle, Produce Manager at Genway, the Supermarket for genetically engineered foods!
I do love it when people who work in a lab finally get some small portion of the adulation they deserve. For me, the key has always been my beautiful animal-vegetable hybrids – the celery-snake and the pumpkin that screams like a hyena. Others scientific attention-seekers less creative than I are left with the more difficult task of making progress against major diseases. That’s hard work, and the visible successes are rare.
But every now and then something comes along that feels like a true step forward – when a malady that was not fully understood quite suddenly becomes less mysterious. The latest news about how Alzheimer’s spreads is just that sort of thing – a landmark discovery. Now we know that Alzheimer’s Disease moves from brain cell to brain cell in synch with a malfunctioning protein called tau. The next steps are obvious. We know where the disease starts and how it travels. It should be a relatively simple matter to wait along the path, throw a sack over its head, smack it a good one, drag it to the car and throw it in the trunk.
Then we can drive Alzheimer’s far out into the countryside and push it into a roadside ditch, with a stern warning not to come near us again!
OK, that may not be practical. But what we need is something that works like the Endangered Species Act in reverse. A deadly illness extinct-ifying process. I’m not sure exactly how that would work, but I know it takes a special talent to take a thing that is already in the world and completely lose it. Usually a little residue always remains. And yet there are so many bad things that need to go away.
That’s why I, Dr. Larry Kyle, would like to offer myself to the next president as the first manager of a new government agency – the Department of Oblivion. At D.O.O., we would be all about thoroughly misplacing things. As Department of Oblivion Manager, I would have the coolest acronym in all government service! Under my direction, the Department would so completely lose track of Alzheimer’s it would be gone from human memory inside a year. Same with most of the cancers, all of the vascular problems, lung disease, tapeworms and mange.
Yes, I am a scientist and a capitalist at heart, but I would change my focus and join government service in this noble cause! But only to lead the Department of Oblivion, because keeping inadequate or non-existent records would be central to our mission, and not doing paperwork is one of the things I do best!
Take me seriously, Mr. President-to-be. Choose me to be your D.O.O.M.!
Like many in the private sector, Dr. Kyle overestimates how effective he would be as the head of a public entity. But you have to admire his enthusiasm.
If you ran a government agency (real or imagined), which one would it be?
