Scientists are tinkering with a drug that could let you edit your memories.

That sounds like a promising development. Crimson Tide football fans would love to erase from memories that long series of losses to Auburn and that incredible loss to Louisiana-Monroe a couple of seasons ago. We Georgia Bulldog fans would like to edit the 2008 season, blipping out that humiliating drubbing from Alabama, that humiliating loss to Florida and that awful defeat at the hands of Georgia Tech. Matter of fact, we’d like to forget the past 20 years of encounters with the Florida Gators. It would be nice to hear about a guy named Steve Spurrier and be able to ask innocently, “Who’s he?”

The New York Times tells us that researchers in Brooklyn have come up with a drug that can find its way to areas of the brain that hold certain memories and painlessly dissolve them. The research so far has been confined to animals, although I have anecdotal evidence that somebody has been sneaking it into my coffee.

I could use a pill that would let me hold onto certain memories. Like where I left my glasses between the time I logged off my computer and the time I sat down to solve the daily crossword. I sometimes get up to go to the kitchen, and somewhere between the recliner and the refrigerator, forget what I got up to get. And when I’m ready to work a crossword, I can never remember where I laid my pen

It would be nice to be able to pop a pill every time I make a memory I want to preserve, but there’s a catch: I’d have to remember to take the pill. I can save stuff on my computer, provided I remember to click on the “save button.” But how many times have I lost a bunch of work because I forgot to hit “save” and the computer decided to take a break without asking permission to be excused?

Saving what you want to remember is one thing; forgetting what you want to forget is another. Debbie Reynolds once made some consoling cash singing “Am I that easy to forget?” after Eddie Fisher jilted her in favor of Liz Taylor. It would be nice if we all had Eddie’s gift for forgetting, though I wonder how easy it was for him to forget Liz after Richard Burton came along.

There are certainly memories I would like to blot from my brain, starting with the time in 7th grade when the principal laid a few licks with a leather strap on my behind after I was caught sailing paper airplanes out of a third-story window while the teacher was out of the classroom. If he were around today, I could haul him into court for child abuse. Where was the ACLU when I needed it?

I would like to zap the memory of the time I bought that used 1958 Renault Dauphine, on the mistaken assumption that it was just a prettier version of the Volkswagen Beetle and that all rear-engine cars built in Europe could be trusted. I spent the next couple of years taking it into the Buick dealership, where I became well acquainted with the Renault mechanic. Parts were forever falling off that car, and the mechanic would be nice enough to replace them by borrowing parts from another Renault he had on the rack. He would put new parts on the donor Dauphine as soon as they arrived from France, which took only a couple of weeks except during August when all of France was on vacation.

I wonder whether the memory-zapping pill would work if a whole society took it. Suppose you could sneak the medication in the water supply for the Balkans so that the Serbs would forget why they were mad at the Croats and the Albanians could forget why they hated the Macedonians.

Try it on Northern Ireland while you’re at it. Sneak it into every bottle of Jameson’s and every mug of Guinness. Pretty soon, you’d see Irish Catholics out pub crawling with Irish Protestants, and the only explosions you’d hear would be the popping of corks.

You’d need a bountiful supply for the Middle East to expunge the memories of why Arabs hate Jews, Jews hate Arabs, Sunnis hate Shi’ites and Afghans hate everybody. Maybe the hatred is in their genes instead of in their brains.

While we’re at it, maybe we Southerners could expunge from our minds the memories of Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Appomattox, leaving only the glorious image of Yankees fleeing before the triumphant gray at Manassas. If the burning memories of Sherman’s march to the sea could be doused, a lot of intersectional bitterness would die out, too.

And would it help if we could wipe out the memory of 245 years of slavery and another century of racial discrimination? Would Creeks, Cherokee and Sioux be happier if they could forget about Horseshoe Bend, the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee? Would we all be richer if the memory of Little Bighorn could be wiped out as thoroughly as Custer’s army was eliminated?

Hard to tell.

George Santayana, the Spanish-born American philosopher is famous for observing, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Maybe there’s something to that. I never sailed another paper airplane out of a classroom window. I never bought another Renault Dauphine.

Now where’s that crossword? And where in tarnation did I put that pen?

Readers may e-mail Gene Owens at WadesDixieco@AOL.com