Compassion for Justice Department Aide Drives Effort
Cotswald Industries of Baltimore plans a $100 million public stock offering to fund development of a new drug that will help government officials improve their short-term memory, the company said yesterday. It hopes to take advantage of an epidemic of forgetfulness among Federal officials that has plagued Washington in recent months.
“I can’t pick up a newspaper anymore without reading about how yet another public servant has no recollection of events that happened just months, or even mere weeks before,” said Edwin Cotswald, the company’s founder. “What’s particularly worrisome is that some of them are young people, barely in their thirties, who seem to have difficulty remembering anything more complex than their name or the names of their children.”
The flamboyant and eccentric entrepreneur, who has invented such items as the talking beer mat and the combination dishwasher-shower, said the company will use funds from the stock offering to to partner with an unnamed pharmaceutical company to develop the forgetfulness drug.
“We have acquired the rights to a new compound that has shown encouraging results in bringing back short-term memory in laboratory animals and in some of my more forgetful family members,” Cotswald said. “I’m very encouraged that we can have an effective and safe drug on the market very soon that could help with this epidemic that is destroying the lives of talented public servants and impeding government affairs.”
Cotswald was in the news last fall when he was swept out to sea and had to be rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter after winds from tropical storm Ernesto took hold of a large kite he was testing.
The inventor, who often describes himself as a “confirmed crackpot,” said he realized how urgent the need for a government official forgetfulness drug was when he read news accounts of the testimony before Congress by Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff. Appearing before the the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sampson said more than 100 times that he could not recall recent events that involved him.
“I felt sorry for him,” Cotswald said. “It just sort of dawned on me in one of those ‘ah ha!’ moments that if there had been a memory pill that young man could have taken before he sat down in the witness chair, he would have been far more helpful to the committee and its inquiries.”
Cotswald said that he planned to test the memory pill on himself once animals studies show it to be safe. “There’s lots of things I’ve forgotten and it would be nice to take a pill so that I could remember what they are,” he said.