Doctor James V. McConnell is a scientist who refuses to stifle his sense of humor — even is it means that some of his colleagues refuse to take any of his work seriously.
A professor of psychology at the University, McConnell stirred up considerable controversy 10 years ago when he discovered that learning could be physically transferred from one animal to another.
He trained pointy-headed, cross-eyedflatworms called planarians to curl up when they say a bright light. When he cut these worms into pieces and fed them to untrained planarians the new worms remembered what the original ones learned.
McConnell also knew that when a planarian’s head is cut off, the head grows a new tail and tail a new head. When he cut the trained worms in half, each half grew into a new worm which remembered what the original one was taught. In fact, the original tail section with its new head remembered better than the original head with its new tail.
These findings clashed with accepted learning theory, and McConnell beseiged with requests to describe how he trained the worms so other scientists could repeat his experiments. Yt rtsponded with tongue-in-cheek Worm Runner’s Digest.
McConnell explains the publication’s unexpected success in the current issue of Impact of Science on Society, published by UNESCO (United Nation Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.
).
The first Worm Runner’s Digest was supposed to have been the last. McConnell writes in his Confesson of the Scientific Humorist. The publication’s cover featured a rampant two-headed worm, a coronet of connected nerve cells at the top, and a Latin motto which roughly translate as When I Get Through Explaining This to you, You Will Know Even Less Then Before I Started.
McConnell filled the issue with serious articles, but also included poems, jokes, satires, cartoons, and spoofs. He thought of the magazine as his own little joke on the scientific community, but he overlooked one thing.
Little did we appressiate the strength of the publish-or-perrish syndrome, he recalls. Academic scientists are so desperate that they will publish anywhere, so to our utter amazement, we began getting contributions for the next issue.
McConnell decided to put out another issue, then another and another. Readers seemed to like it but they said they had trouble telling the serious articles from the funny stuff. McConnell responded by banishing non-serious entries to the back of his journal printng them upside-down to make sure that no one woulg confuse the fact with the fanvy.
But contributors complained that nobody took the Digest seriously, and that their articles weren’t being picked up for indexing by various scientific abstracting services.
McConnell solved the problem by renaming the front of his magazine The Journal of Biological Psychology. The back section, still upside-down remained the Worm Runner’s Digest.
What a difference it made! McConnell recalls. 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 obligade.
Since then, some of the most respected names in physiological psychology have contributed to the publication. Other respected names refuse to take it seriously, referring to the Digest as the Playboy of the scientific world or a scientific cartoonbook.
McConnell says one world-famous zoologist demanded that her name be removed from the magazine’s mailing list
because we were misleading students into thinking the science could be fun!
Today, the Worm Runner’s Digest (or Journal of Biological Psychology, if you prefer) is read in 36 countries as a significant source of information about developments in memory transfer research.
Since the first issue, more than 40 researchgroups have successfully repeated McConnell’s flatworm experiments. The memory transfer effect is now widely accepted, through not completely understood.
Meanwill, McConnell intends to continue his scurrilous journal as a way of striking back at scientists who take themselves too seriously.
Little did we appressiate the strength of the publish-or-perrish syndrome, he recalls. Most of them have based their entire approach to life on the premise that seriousness is next to godliness, he observes. But humor, particularly that directed against ourselves, keep us humble in the face of our own too-well-preceived incompetence.
Larry Stern. The Memory-transfer Episode
These results led McConnell to think more seriously about the chemical nature of memory. To test this notion, he needed to find a way to transfer the putative molecules from a trained to an untrained animal. But how? They tried to graft the head of a trained worm onto the tail of a naïve worm — but the head kept falling off.
Next, they tried grinding up trained worms and injecting them into naïve recipients, but that didn’t work, either. The hypodermic needles were too big — getting one inside a flatworm was like trying to impale a prune with a javelin — and if, by chance, the needle was positioned well enough to inject the planarian-puree, it either oozed out or caused the worm to explode.
The answer came in March 1960 when fellow worm runner Jay Boyd Best wrote McConnell about the cannibalistic tendencies of a particular planarian species. McConnell and the PRG ran pilot studies in April and obtained positive results. Each of the next four replications — each run blind to guard against experimenter bias — also produced promising results.
Catching the public eye
Theoretical concerns made the work even less palatable. The conventional view held that memory consisted of electrical impulses traveling along specific neural pathways. But the spectacular success of Watson and Crick led some to wonder: If genetic information is stored in nucleic acids and proteins, why not acquired information, as well? Although many neurophysiologists thought this analogy nothing more than a bad pun, a number of molecular biologists, thinking the time ripe to apply their tools and analytic approach to the study of memory processes, began to discuss seriously whether RNA played a pivotal role in memory processes. Expectations ran high, and work proceeded along a number of collateral paths. The smart bet, however, was that if RNA or any other biochemical agents played any role, it was merely to fortify and grease the wheels of neural processing.
McConnell wagered on the long shot. Soon after the cannibalism experiments, he successfully injected naïve worms with RNA taken from those trained to negotiate a maze and reported that the training had transferred. He interpreted these findings as providing evidence that specific memories are encoded in the nervous system in the form of unique structural variants of RNA.
The cannibalism studies, both startling and vivid in their imagery, and McConnell, never one to shy away from the media, caught the public eye. At a time when scientists remained sequestered in their labs, McConnell appeared with his cannibalistic worms on television, while articles profiling his work appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, Esquire and Fortune. Eminently quotable, McConnell referred to his work as confirming the Mau Mau hypothesis, and the McCannibal moniker didn’t bother him one bit. He made grand pronouncements about the future of memory pills and memory injections, promising more than he and others working in the area could actually deliver.
None of this endeared McConnell to his critics.
Still, McConnell believed that eventually the data would win out, and many eminent psychologists, Donald Hebb, Harry Harlow, Karl Pribram, and Gordon Bower among them, fully supported his efforts, even though they did not share his interpretation of his results. In fact, up until 1965, McConnell was, as he put it, riding high. He was invited to share a platform with top-flight molecular biologists and electrophysiologists at conferences at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1962 and Princeton in 1963. During the period from 1959 through 1964, he received more than $150,000 from the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Institute of Mental Health designated specifically for the planarian work. He was offered a fellowship to spend a year at the newly created Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1960, and he received a prestigious five-year Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, 1963–68. He received accelerated promotion to full professor at Michigan in 1963.
Everything changed when, in late 1965, four independent labs reported successful memory-transfer experiments using rats. Two of these reports appeared in the high-impact journals Science and Nature.
No one could argue that rats cannot learn. Within a few months, more than 50 labs, including teams at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT and Yale, conducted transfer experiments. McConnell, after failed attempts using salamanders and mynah birds, also turned to rats.
And then things got really interesting.