Last week Daedalus contemplated the sensitivity of the brain to microwaves. He recalled brain theory, insofar as it exists. Each brain cell has many inputs (dendrites) and one main output (its axon); these are connected to other brain cells. Very plausibly, each dendrite is potentiated or inhibited by a specific protein molecule, whose configuration turns it on or off. And the shuffling of amino acids and the re-ordering of protein chains occurs at microwave frequencies. So mobile phones and microwave towers do a lot of unintended damage.

But controlled memory loss could be very welcome in psychiatry. Many people are haunted by dire memories, which prevent them re-entering places or circumstances, or make them fearful of certain normal human activities. A simple microwave irradiation, neatly erasing the damaging memory, could be gladly accepted. So DREADCO biochemists are irradiating test organisms, hoping to find that pattern of frequency or combination of frequencies that can erase a specific memory — in rats, for example, how to run a given maze.

The extension of this scheme to human psychiatry will be fraught with hazard. Fortunately, the main complaints about mobile phones refer to the loss of short-term memory only. Psychiatrists could screen mobile-phone users for the sort of information lost, and employ subjects who do not mind losing useless short-term data (perhaps certain recent breakfast menus). Furthermore, some quite worrying methods have been accepted by psychiatrists despite their potential for memory loss (electroconvulsive therapy is an example). So careful microwave-irradiation stands a good chance.

But Daedalus's main worry is the adoption of his methods by the politicos. A wide-band high-energy microwave assault on the brain might scramble all its data long before heating set in. The most convinced capitalist or advocate of human freedom could crumble before such brain-washing. Against that, how many fierce species have their hatred of humanity stored as software rather than hardware? A DREADCO selective irradiation might produce genuinely friendly lions and tigers, cheerfully accepting crocodiles and alligators. The range of tameable, tractable species could be wonderfully extended. Even the wild cat of the Scottish Highlands, said to hate everything on sight, might be converted to a purring fireside moggy.