Confessions of a Scientific Humorist
by James V. McConnell
Obviously we were worm runners, and so the title of our manual simply had to be Worm Runner’s Digest. One of the girls designed a crest that appeared on the cover (Fig. 4), with a rampant two-headed worm, a coronet of connected nerve cells at the top, a Latin motto (which Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler, was a Hungarian-born author and journalist.
translates as When I get through explaining this to you, you will know even less than before I started), an S and an R for stimulus-response, a Y for psychology, and a pair of diagonal stripes painted the maize-and-blue colours of the University of Michigan. (It wasn’t until years later that we learned that in the language of heraldry, diagonal stripes across your escutcheon mean that you’re descended from a bastard; as I like to say, there’s been a good deal of serendipity in our research.)
Fig. 4. The Crest of Worm Runner’s Digest
To top the manual off, we called it Volume I, No. 1, the joke being that we had no intention of continuing its publication. Little did we appreciate the strength of the publish-or-perish syndrome. Academic scientists are so desperate that they will publish anywhere (for the Dean really doesn’t know the difference), so to our utter amazement, we began getting contributions for the next issue. Hoist with our own petard, there was nothing we could do but put out a next issue, and a next, and a next…. And now, here we are, a journal with ten years behind us, an international circulation (thirty-six countries) numbered in the thousands. One of our crowning achievements, incidentally, was the receipt of a letter from the Library of the Academy of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation; and additional scientific and social units such as libraries, publishing units, and hospitals.
of the U.S.S.R.
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.
offering an official exchange of journals. We wonder still if they quite knew what they were getting. Of course, even as our circulation increased, we remained unique. We decided that most scientific journals are deadly dull, and ours would be different. To pep things up abit, we included poems, jokes, satires, cartoons, spoofs and short stories scattered more or less randomly among the more serious articles. People seemed to like this melange; or at least, some of them did. A few people complained that they didn’t have time to waste on the (admittedly) sophomoric humour — they wanted the truth and nothing else. Their trouble was that they often found themselves getting halfway through a satire before they realized (dimly) that their leg was being pulled. We would have ignored such complaints had they not come from some of the most famous and influential members of the scientific community. (Any conclusions you wish to draw about the qualities necessary to gather fame in the scientific community are made on your own time.) To help these poor souls out, we resorted to a propagation device much like the worm’s—namely, we split in two. We gathered all of the so-called funny stuff and banished it to the back of the journal, printing it upside down to make sure that no one would confuse the fact with the fancy. The Digest inched along this way for several years, until we faced another crisis. The authors of our serious articles complained that they weren’t getting adequate coverage. When an article is published in most scientific journals, it is picked up by one of the abstracting services for dissemination in abstract form. Despite the fact that the serious side of the Digest contained some pretty meaty stuff, none of the abstracting services would touch anything that came from a journal with such an odd name as ours. Eventually, as a kind of last-ditch compromise, we changed the name of the front half of the Digest, calling it The Journal of Biological Psychology. Nothing else was changed but the name, but what a difference it made! Within two months we received letters from Psychological Abstracts, Biological Abstracts and Chemical Abstracts asking that we send them this new journal for abstracting. Naturally, we obliged.
As I look back at the past ten years or so, it becomes apparent to me that life would have been a lot easier had the Digest suffered a stillbirth. Much of the controversy surrounding the work on memory transfer stems in no small part from the fact that it received its first publication in what some of my colleagues still refer to as the Playboy of the scientific world.
WORM RUNNER’S DIGEST
TABLE OF CONTENT
Volume 19 Issue 2
Published Dec 1, 1977
- James V. McConnell. Worms & Things.
- William Byrne, David Malin, Arnold M. Golub. In Memoriam: George Ungar; A Tribute to George Ungar; Some Thoughts on the Life to the Editor & on Publishing in Controversial Research Areas: A Case History.
- Louise G. Lippman. Approximating Real-World Contingencies in the Human Operant Laboratory.
- H. E. Marks. A Simple, Inexpensive Apparatus to Measure Taste Preference Behavior in Mice.
- Cheryl A. Logan & Hall P. Beck. Persistent Sensitization Following Habituation in the Sea Anemone, Anthopleura elegantissima.
- Terry Maple, Deborah Bernard, & Michael McGlynn. Dominance-Related Ambisexuality in Two Male Rhesusv Monkeys (Macaca mulatta.)
- M. Aaron Roy. Early Rearing of Infrahuman Primates wiyh Reduced Conspecific Contacts: A Selected Bibliography. Part III.
- Patricia Bate & Robert J. Kirkby. Response Alternation in Coral Reef Fish.
- Paul R. Sanberg & Vijendra Singh.Bird Song as a Transfer Experiment? A Short Commentary.
- Andy Kilpatrick & John Kirkland. A Neonatal Pain-Cry Effect on Caretakers & Noncaretakers of Each Sex.
- William F. Fry, Jr. & Con Rader. The Respiratory Components of Mirthful Laughter.
- James L. Colwell. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins.
- Joseph W. Bastien. Freud & Future Religious Experience, Anthony J. DeLuca.
- Joel Greenspoon. Basic Psychological Therapies: Comparative Effectiveness, A. J. Fix, & E. A. Haffke.
- Charles C. Cleland. Narcolepsy, Christian Guilleminault. William Dement, & Pierre Passouant (Eds.)
- Dennis R. Brightwell. Recent Progress in Perception: Reading from Scientific American, Introductions by Richard Held & Whitman Richards.
- Thomas L. Dynneson. Essay in Prejustice, Samuel Kahn.
- Jack Demarest. Evolution of Brain & Behavior in Vertebrates, R. B. Masterton, C. B. G. Campbell, M. E. Bittrman, N. Horton (Eds.); & Evolution, Brain & Behavior: Persistent Problems, R. B. Masterton, W. Hodos, & H. Jerison (Eds.)
- Nicholas C. Kiernievsky. Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research (Enlarged Edition), Robert Rosenthal.
- Gary V. Sluyter. Testing & Measurement in the Classroom, Dale P. Scannell, & D. E. Tracy.
- Jessica L. Jones. Mental Retardation: A Developmental Approach, Charles C. Cleland; The Mentally Retarded (Fourth Edition,) Thomas E. Jordan, & The Mentally Retarded Child (Second Edition), Nancy M. & Halbert B. Robinson.
- atheryne Serrurier. Female Psychology: The Emerging Self, Sue Cox.
- Kenneth Schuepbach. Crowding & Behavior, Jonathan L. Freedman.
- Patricia G. Peffer. Advances in the Study of Behavior, Volume 6, Jay S. Rosenblatt, Robert A. Hinde, Evelyn Shaw, & Colin Beer.
- Paula E. Greenlee. Progress in Psychobiology: Reading from Scientific American, Richard F. Thompson (Ed.)
- Jon D. Swartz. We Get Journals! Seven New Serial Publications in the Behavioral, Educational, & Health Sciences.
- J. D. S. Higher Education: The Journal of Non-Traditional Studies, W. A. McCallum (Ed.); Environmental Psychology & Nonverbal Behavior, R. M. Lee (Ed.>; Journal of Psychiatric Education, Robert Cancro & Zebulon Taintor (Cheef Eds.); Motivation & Emotion, Mortimer H. Appley (Ed.); Psychology of Women Quarterly, Georgia Babladelis (Ed.); Sensory Processes, Lawrence E. Marks (Ed.); Sociological Practice, Donald E. Gelfand & Bernard S. Philips (Co-Eds.); Re Reviewers & Reviewed
- Maria Teresa Covos. Forthcoming Reviews, Books Available for Review.
