“Welding Makes You Feel Powerful”

Chemistry Major David Myers Shares His Plans for World Domination

Dave Myers is from Peoria, Illinois. He is a chemistry major and he’s starting a Frisbee Golf club here on campus. “Frolfing, we call it,” says Dave. Read on to find out how he’ll be controlling your brain when he grows up.

Tell me what I can understand about chemistry.

I like chemistry because when you can use it to understand everything that goes on around you, you can truly understand how things are then manipulate them to your advantage. I want to go into medicine. You need chemical knowledge to understand all the terminology, all the processes, how drugs work … It’s really about trying to understand how things work on the molecular level.

So you have to understand how they work just by reading about them?
You have to do a lot of measurements. A lot of times, you can tag certain molecules with fluorescence, so once they break down or go through a certain reaction, the fluorescence fades, comes back in. It’s all about using what you can measure to figure out what you don’t know.

So it’s just like algebra.
It’s a lot of math.

You like art.
I really enjoy it – I love sculpting and welding especially. Welding makes you feel powerful. You can manipulate these strong things.

Are you doing another welding project?
I’m going to build a big pole that comes up and gets smaller as it goes up, probably four or five feet tall, and have something on the top that can either spin, or I’m going to hang things – hopefully I’ll be able to make it spin around.

What inspired you to do that?
I like doing structures like that – things that can stand up and support [their] own weight. I saw some dude on the Internet that had a bunch of them and I was like, “Wow.” Some dude from Arizona or New Mexico – he used to live in a commune in Washington or Oregon. He went to college and after college he was like, fuck this. So he went and had fun on a commune for a few years and he loved it. Tried to go back to some kind of engineering or whatever he studied in college and he couldn’t do it. He was like, “This is a waste of my life.”

He couldn’t handle the real world?
[He’d experienced] a more peaceful way of living than going through the stresses of everyday capitalism in the US. So he started collecting steel in his backyard and just making things. I think it was Royce Carlson.

I’m excited to see it. Where are you from?
Illinois. Peoria.

I’ve heard of that town.
It’s great. I like the friendly people. There’s about the Midwest – everybody’s nicer. Clerks, even – clerks are just happy all the time.

What else is different about the East coast? I always wonder if that distinction is as concrete as it seems to be. Would you say that there is a disparity?
There is, but it gets blurred a lot. It’s hard to make the full distinction – a lot of the small towns and cities around here are just like the towns in cities in Illinois. I think it’s just a matter of social etiquette. In Illinois, it’s much calmer. Out here, it’s a race to talk fast. If you go up to Chicago, it’s similar to DC. Just because city life is no fun.

Maybe it’s not so much of a difference between -
East coast and west coast. Its more of like -

City and country. That’s definitely a possibility.
There’s still the fast talking.

We talk faster?
A lot faster.

So are you going to medical school?
I think so. I took the MCAT last summer, which is way earlier than most people do it, which is spring of their junior year. I took the summer before my junior year. I did well enough, so I should be able to get in.

What made you want to take it so early?
You usually have to go through some sort of preparation in order to take it, because there’s so much stuff you have to learn. I just had a whole lot more time this summer. I thought I could just spend a month and a half intensively working on this stuff, pounding it into my brain, and take [the test] before school [started]. I thought it would be way more efficient and I would probably score better if I could just get it done, not have to worry about anything else.

Was everyone like, “You’re crazy”?
Kind of. My advisor was like, “what?” I was like, I’m gonna do it. Relax.

You’re happy with your score?
Absolutely.

Do you think you’re going to be a doctor of people or a doctor of making medicine?
I’ll probably go into something like neuro-psychiatry, or the psychiatry of brain imaging. I was reading this book about this doctor from California. Around 2004, he had just started using this thing called SPECT imaging - single photon emission computed tomography.

Whaaa?
It’s able to measure and pick up on metabolic things that are going on in your brain. If a certain area of your brain is really working hard, they can pick that up. Basically its going change psychiatry. People can say, “I feel depressed.” In the brain, that can be triggered by numerous, numerous things – five to ten different things completely aside from one another. Back in the day, they would just use serotonin inhibitors. There were only a few ways to treat it. Those drugs can cause it to get worse if it’s not diagnosed correctly. What he’s doing is going to change the face of psychiatry and I want to jump in on that. The brain and genetics are the only places in the human body that we haven’t really investigated.

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