The painful end to a passionate love affair can take months, even years, to recover from. Sometimes you never really get over it. Not entirely.

The death of a loved one can produce the same scars. So can being the victim of a particularly vicious crime, one that constantly replays itself in your nightmares.

They're horrible things to endure.

But they're also the things that, searing as the pain may be, remind you that you're a living, sentient being. The pain and sorrow of life, and how you deal with their effects, is part of what fuels your humanity. It's part of what lets you continue growing throughout that life, part of what gives you wisdom in your old age.

Now science is on the verge of wiping that out.

A study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research reports that researchers at Harvard and Montreal's McGill University are getting good results from propranolol, a drug used in the treatment of amnesia, that appears to block, if not completely remove, bad memories on a selective basis.

The drug was tested using 19 victims of various kinds of trauma, including accidents and rape. Some subjects were given propranolol, others a placebo. Researchers say that in those receiving the drug, the biochemical pathways that serve memory were disrupted sufficiently enough to dull, if not erase, the most painful recollections.

You can argue that if science is capable of doing this, then people shouldn't have to remember terrible things at all. It's a tempting notion, a siren song, no doubt about it. But is it ultimately healthy? I'm no shrink and I have no answer. But I think it's worth asking the question.

Did the postman ring twice while your wife was at home and now they've fled to Capri, leaving you with the kids and the mortgage? Take one of these pills, man, and forget about it.

Hell, if that was me I'd like to forget it.

But my gut tells me that there would be unintended, and probably undesirable, consequences. It tells me that this might be one of those times, like Dr. Frankenstein's attempt to reanimate life, when science is pushing around in dark corners where it shouldn't go. It's a view that I know many Wired News readers, besotted as they are with Vin de la technologie, do not share.

Is there an ethicist in the house?

Or am I making too much out of this human-experience thing? Maybe erasing all unpleasantness is just what Dr. Feelgood ordered, the perfect metaphor for a new world that a surfeit of technology is helping to forge: one lacking in passion, empathy … just plain humanity.

Like anyone who has lived a life, I've got my share of baggage, some of it better forgotten. But if offered a pill tomorrow to make all the bad stuff miraculously disappear, I'd turn it down. I may not like the pain of remembering, but I know it's a part of who I am.

Without it, I'm just a Stepford wife with a chemical lobotomy.

Besides, if I really want to forget, well … as Bogie says in Casablanca, "It's nothing that a little bourbon and soda couldn't fix."

Tony Long is copy chief at Wired News.