Man I love government acronyms. They never cease to make me smile.

I tried my hand at one once. mk and I were responding to a grant call that was referred to as EUREKA, which stood for Exceptional Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration (can one accelerate knowledge? Is that a question that I even need to ask?).

Our proposal revolved around trying to use bone marrow cells from young rats to extend the life of old rats. With that in mind, and their stupid 6 letter, reverse engineered, tortured acronym, I set out to make an even more tortured 7 letter acronym. The best I could do was BATHORY, which stood for Bone marrow Autologous Therapy Helping the Old Regain Youthfulness. BATHORY refers to Elizabeth Bathory, a late 16th to early 17th c. Hungarian countess who used to kill her hand maidens for--among other reasons--the purpose of bathing in their blood, as she thought that the blood of young girls could help her stay young and beautiful herself.

I doubt anyone on the review committee was clever enough to run a Google on Bathory. Needless to say the grant was laughed out of the building (at us, not with us), and then two years later some jagoff Frankenstein sewed a young mouse to an old mouse and was all over the science headlines for being a genius.