Great Moments in Scientific Achievement, Part Un (French for “Uhh…”)

Every once in a while scientists conduct a study that proves to be a watershed moment in the history of scientific achievement. These hard working nerd-people dig deep into the mysteries of our world in their never ending quest for knowledge. They seek to increase our collective understanding of the world through intensive and rigorous testing, study, and experimentation. These people aren’t in it for the glory, or the fame. They don’t care that nobody knows they were the Captain of their college Dungeons and Dragons team, or that they were the only one out of the sixteen people dressed as Klingons at the Science Department Halloween party that could actually speak Klingon.

Why just last night on NOVA: Science Now (yeah, yeah, I know. Paris Hilton’s New BFF wasn’t on yet), I learned from one delightful scientist fellow that Leeches have many roles to play in the medical field, some of them quite helpful. I had previously thought that Leeches’ roles in the medical field were confined to the ambulance-chasing malpractice lawyer and the health-care reform pushing politician. Turns out they have other uses, like sucking pus and blood and rotten shit out of gangrenous wounds. A less glamorous, but eerily similar role to that of the lawyers and politicians. I also learned from some other astronomer-scientist types that the people involved in the SETI search for intelligent life in the universe project are now composed of under 80% Trekkies, a startling achievement on the road to acceptance by the public at large. It was also interesting to learn that in order to set a baseline for the intelligence detecting instrument, the scientists trained it on the US Congress, and were able to calibrate the machine to absolute zero! Good thinking, geeks!

Seeing some of the great work being done out in the world of scientific investigation made it all the more worrisome when I stumbled across the following headline; not exactly one of those watershed moments in scientific history:

“Study Suggests Binge Drinking Affects Memory”

Well I guess this is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. If the nerds that conducted this particular study had spent more time at frat parties and less time signing up for Psyc Department studies as guinea pigs, they wouldn’t have needed to conduct this study at all. Those of us who have undertaken “binge drinking” (or as we used to call it “drinking”) could have told anyone that would listen that of course binge drinking affects memory. It is simple mental self preservation. If it didn’t affect memory, how the hell would we have been able to live through this:

Without binge drinking affecting our memory, imagine our embarrassment when people found out our parents had never shown us how to sit properly on a bench? Thank God our friends were nice enough to be respectful about our disability and not point out that we had shown our handicap while under the influence of binge drink.

The memory-affecting qualities of binge drinking cushioned this poor girl from having to remember her sudden bout of narcolepsy at her Grandparents’ garden party. She was probably better off not knowing that she had dozed off in the middle of Grandma’s “Tour of the Tulips.”

Luckily for this happily dozing binge drinker, his lack of memory of the evening’s events should prevent him from having to deal with the triple mental trauma of the memories of pissing himself, wearing a Hulkamania T-Shirt, and being caught on camera drinking a Miller Lite.

Now here’s a perfect example of binge drinking’s ability to take a potentially reputation-smearing, life-altering event and turn it into a hazy, imperceptible, shadowy memory that is almost impossible to recall, if it can be recalled at all. The poor fellow on the left has probably battled car sickness since he was a small child, or perhaps he had a bad prawn at dinner that night. Either way, he can’t be blamed for the action occurring in the photo above. If he had any sense at all, he would have begun binge-drinking immediately after this photo was taken, and not stopped until the incident was buried deeply in his subconscious. It would probably be recommended that his somewhat startled companions might also want to binge-drink this particular memory away as well.

Despite all of the good work being done by scientists around the world, they didn’t exactly hit one out of the park with this study. They could have saved a lot of time and money by just doing a little binge-drinking, blacking out, waking up, looking at their vomit stained shirt and piss-soaked pants, and saying to themselves “Ahhh…I see.”