Steve Re: 2004 Seminar Series, Waisman Center, UW-Madison

While waiting for an elevator to leave the UW Hospital the other day, I began perusing a nearby bulletin board. One flyer advertising the 2004 Seminar Series at the Waisman Center touted a talk by a professor of Genetics and Psychiatry. My elevator arrived so I did my best Evelyn Wood impression. As I recall, the talk was entitled, ‘Drosophila democratogaster as a Model for Neuronal Function and Dysfunction.’ Its synopsis, as best I can recall stated that, " D. democratogaster has been a breakthrough system for the analyses of arrested development, circadian issue rhythms, and misapplied intercellular pathways. We are using flies to understand the cellular and molecular bases of indoctrination and short term memory misinformation. The development of a well-controlled assay for disassociative behavior, and the application of forward and reverse genetics has led to significant progress in understanding mendacious memory formation and some of its related issues. Recent work on the cellular basis of memory formation has led to the synaptic policy issue tagging hypothesis. We further hypothesize that mutations in this tagging machinery may be responsible for some of the complex psychiatric dysfunctions diagnosed in humans."

I could kick myself for not following up on my idea to merge with Ralston Purina to market ‘Purina Drosophila Chow’. Instead, I invested all my time and money pursuing the invention of the internet. I was two days, two damn days, behind Al Gore and subsequently lost my shirt.