Via Technovelgy comes news of progress in erasing memories using drugs, a mechanism independent of the way said memories actually form. Admittedly, the state of the art so far appears to be making fruit flies forget that certain smells coincided with a shock administered to one of their legs, but hey, you gotta start somewhere…

Fans of memory-erasure should check out Marissa Lingen’s subtle yet highly affecting Futurismic story “Erasing The Map” from back in February 2009. Her fictional erasure is surgical, not chemical, but the moral questions care nothing for the methods used…