Larry Stern. James V. McCONNELL’S ADVOCACY OF MEMORY-TRANSFER:

Apology

I must begin with an apology for the announced title of my talk this afternoon. It’s not only quite lame but, worse, it is misleading and, in part, quite wrongheaded.

The first part of my title is fine. I will, rest assured, speak about Jim McConnell, his cannibalistic worms and the memory transfer episode that has come to be closely associated with his name.

For those of you not familiar with this episode, or are only familiar with the simplified version that seems to have become part of folklore in psychology, let me spend a moment giving you a brief synopsis before I tell you why the second part of my title, with its references to juggling, tightrope walking, circus images and, most pointedly, personae, warrants – indeed, demands – an apology.

Simply put, proponents of memory transfer argued that that specific memories could be transferred from trained donors to naïve recipients via ingestion in worms – cannibalism – as well as through the injection of brain extracts from various rodents and other experimental subjects into suitable recipients.

It wasn’t just that these claims, both startling and vivid in their imagery, sounded strange – even bizarre. What agitated many scientists investigating neural mechanisms of learning and memory was the unorthodox interpretation McConnell suggested to account for the phenomenon.

Readily acknowledging that his ideas were rather “wild” and in clear violation of the conventional view that memory is primarily a matter of electrical impulses traveling along specific neural pathways, McConnell argued instead that memories are encoded in the structure of new variants of RNA and/or other macromolecules; that a unique and specific archival molecule – not a neural pathway – is the memory.

Over the course of the episode – and it was in full swing for at least fifteen years – this claim was referred to, in print, as idiotic, pure rubbish, fanciful, a fad, and pseudoscience. Nobel laureate James Watson, lowering the bar somewhat, called it, simply, “sheer unmitigated rot.” On more than one occasion, researchers conducting transfer experiments were called either “crackpots,” charlatans, or “fanatics.”

And yet, as I reported last year, transfer research was taken quite seriously by funding agencies, editors of reputable journals, and by many prominent – not marginal – scientists investigating the neural substrates of memory processes. I shall have occasion to return to this at the end of my talk.

But what seemed to rankle investigators even more than McConnell’s radical theory of memory processes was the publicity he seemed to invite and enjoy and the manner with which he promoted the memory transfer phenomenon.

McConnell was, in fact, a self-proclaimed “maverick,” “heretic,” “primadonna,” and “exhibitionist, ” He was, to be sure, “some piece of work.” He was variously described by both friends and foes as irreverent, quick-witted, flamboyant, brutally honest, and oft-times pretentious. Others referred to him in less flattering terms. He relished referring to himself and his planarian experiments as “McCannibal and his Mau Mau Hypothesis.” He appeared with his cannibalistic worms on an ABC –TV Special The Way Out Men and on The Steve Allen Show. He spoke of “professor burgers.” He made grand pronouncements in the media about the future of “memory pills” and “memory injections.” He lampooned the “sacred cow” of science, took audiences “backstage” and glibly spoke of the foibles of researchers and the myriad ways in which experiments often go awry. He edited and published the infamous Worm Runner’s Digest, a mixture of straight science and spoof that, after a few years, split into two when some scientists complained that they couldn’t readily distinguish between the serious and humorous articles.

But none of this justifies the borderline slanderous, certainly misleading, and in some ways factually incorrect sub-title of my paper.

First, the term “personae.” Please! I’m a sociologist – we don’t use such terms. And its inclusion in the sub-title is a clear case of shameful pandering on my part to the psychologists and historians of psychology that make up the bulk of the membership of Cheiron.

This is not to say that sociologists don’t recognize that individuals portray themselves in different ways in different social settings – and sometimes in different ways at different moments in the same setting – surely they do. It is axiomatic in sociology that human beings in general – and, as shall be seen, Jim McConnell in particular – regardless of their personality, tendencies, and/or style – act differently within the variously structured social contexts that impose constraints on their actions.

Writing for the reputable peer-reviewed journals is one thing, presenting at the more relaxed and informal setting that conferences present is quite another. And, speaking – or writing – to or for a general or popular audience is not the same as addressing one’s colleagues as complex materials tend to be somewhat simplified while caveats are minimized or disappear altogether. Speaking to journalists, of course, is an altogether different experience and here, once you’ve had your say, it is, quite literally, out of your hands. Journalists are embedded in their own professional and institutional contexts and these have been known to shape – perhaps hype and even distort – information provided by their sources.

But the term persona typically brings to mind the conscious switching of masks – of showing different aspects of an individual’s self in different settings. Although McConnell certainly calibrated or fine-tuned his rhetorical approach to different audiences, McConnell was . . . well, consistently McConnell, whether talking to colleagues, a general audience, or the press. The general perception was that he violated normative expectations at every turn. The impact this had on McConnell’s career and the reception of the transfer work in general is the topic for discussion.

So, I will plead guilty to pandering. My only defense is that I put off writing the abstract until the end of classes and holiday break – sound familiar? – and unexpected surgery a few days after Christmas had me popping vicodin on a steady basis as the deadline drew near and as I groped for a catchy title.

But what is worse, my use of circus imagery, even if it, too, owes much to my legally prescribed and, at the time, much needed drug-induced haze, both confuses the issue and borders on slander. Yes, there was, at times, a carnival or circus like atmosphere surrounding much of this work. Although, as shall be seen, McConnell knew how to get and milk publicity and certainly was not reluctant to talk with the press, the enormous publicity that did, in fact, accompany this research owes as much, I believe – if not more – to the changing way that the mass media reported science. By the way, type “smart pills” into “google” today and you’ll get roughly 200,000 hits. “Memory pills” will get you around 15,000.

And I think it borders on slander to suggest that McConnell was a circus performer, juggling anything. Was he an entertaining and humorous man? I guess that depends on where you draw the line between humor and hubris – and whether you think humor has any place in science. But, as I shall argue when I eventually get to the body of this paper – and I best move along – although McConnell could not contain himself when he saw what he perceived to be a humorous opening, he was no clown – he was deadly serious about his research and, if anything, was a staunch positivist. Yes, scientists are, he frequently said, after all, human. And, despite the normative guidelines that science as an institution presents, they are, like other humans, subject to all of the prejudices and idiosyncrasies that afflict men (and women) more generally. But, in the end, McConnell constantly maintained, it was data, data, and more data that would decide the issue.

But let me move on. As I do so you will clearly see why the image of McConnell walking a tightrope is also misleading and that my reference to his being without a net is the most egregious error in the entire title.

Perhaps the title should be “James V. McConnell’s Advocacy of Memory-Transfer: The Segmentation and Blending of Different Rhetorical Strategies Situated in Different Structural Contexts: An Assessment.” I know – it doesn’t have the same oomph, now does it? How about we simply leave it as “James V. McConnell’s advocacy of memory-transfer: An Assessment.”

McConnell's Research

Fifty years ago, his doctorate from the University of Texas in hand, James V. McConnell, then 31 years old, joined the faculty of the University of Michigan as Instructor in Psychology. It was anything but a direct path.

McConnell, born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma in October 1925, was raised in Shreveport.

He was reared to be a devout Christian, was a ‘youth leader’ and expected, up until the age of 15, to be a medical missionary working in the Church.

Disenchanted with organized religion and too young for military service, McConnell entered L.S.U. in 1942, waited a year, then volunteered and was inducted in the Navy. Although the war had ended by the time he completed his officer training, Ensign McConnell still had some exciting times – he was a crew-member of the ship that delivered the atomic bomb to the Bikini Island test site and got to see the blast.

Returning to LSU in 1946, McConnell switched his major from chemical engineering to psychology and worked as a part-time announcer for the university radio station to keep alive.

After graduation McConnell bounced around as a disc-jockey at radio stations in the southwest, became a Program Director in Galveston and, in 1950-1951, wrote and produced a series of radio scripts that received national recognition by the National Association for Education by Radio. This led to his big break. He was hired as the Chief Writer – actually the only writer – for WLW-TV in Cincinnati where he wrote the commercials, skits, and an original musical comedy every week.

The grueling pace led to an ulcer, and when McConnell’s father died he returned to Shreveport to run the family business, a bus station café. Within six months, he developed his second ulcer, was in a deep rut and followed a friend’s advice and applied to graduate school. McConnell was accepted into the Psychology Program at the University of Texas in Austin and off he went.

By the time he received his PhD. in 1956 McConnell had been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and had published three papers. It’s this last paper that got things started – a relatively straight-forward conditioning experiment published in the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology in 1955.

The experiment, suggested by fellow graduate student Robert Thompson, was designed to see if planarians – common flatworms – could be conditioned to associate an electric shock with the appearance of a bright light.

The experiment was not simply a lark. It was prompted by Hebb's theory, then gaining currency, that the “engram” – the physical representation of memory – involved changes at the synapse between two nerve cells. If this was so, they reasoned, a planarian, the simplest animal with true synapses, should be capable of showing true learning. Convinced that they had demonstrated that planarians could be conditioned, they submitted their results, which were published without a hitch. At the time, it went virtually unnoticed; no static at all.

When McConnell arrival at the University of Michigan in the Fall of 1956, his chairman promptly informed him that there were certain expectations – that the old bugaboo that one must publish or perish was indeed true.

He remembered a “giggly” afternoon a few years back in Austin with Thompson when, during one of the dull periods of the conditioning experiments, they came across a two-page spread in Life magazine for the “Toni Home Permanent.” Two identical twins, each with beautifully coiffed hair – one from the beauty parlor, the other using the new product selling for $1.79. The ad challenged the reader to guess which twin had been given the Toni.

Which was the phony that used the Toni, they joked.

And it got them thinking. Cut a planarian across the middle into head and tail sections and each part will regenerate the missing half – resulting in identical twins. If you conditioned a planarian, they wondered, which half of the bisected beast would retain the conditioned response?

Thompson received his degree and went off to L.S.U. to work with rats, and McConnell, now at Michigan, was looking for a publishable experiment. He set up a worm lab in the basement of Mason Hall, “conned” – this is his word – two students into working with him and found, to both his astonishment and delight, that the “[regenerated] tails not only showed as much retention as did the heads, but in many cases did much better than the heads and showed absolutely no forgetting whatsoever.”

The paper appeared in the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology in 1958 and McConnell and his worms were off and running – or slithering, as the case may be. In the next series of experiments McConnell and his students showed – to their satisfaction – that each regenerated part of trained worms cut in several pieces retained the initial training and, more importantly, that a planarian that contained none of the structure of the originally trained animal also retained the memory.

It’s at this point that McConnell began to think about more about memory molecules and less about specific neural synapses. To test this notion, he needed to find a way to transfer the putative molecules from a trained to an untrained animal. But, how? He tried to graft the head of a trained worm onto the tail of a naïve worm – but the head kept falling off.

He tried grinding up trained worms and injecting them into naïve recipients and 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 flatworm-puree, it either oozed out or, if not, caused the worm to explode.

When fellow worm runner Jay Boyd Best wrote McConnell about the cannibalistic tendencies of a particular species of planarians, the light bulb went on and – well, you all know what came next.

Both trained and untrained worms were cannibalized and recipients eating their educated brethren performed better than those ingesting untrained donors. Soon thereafter, McConnell reported that RNA taken from trained worms and injected into naïve recipients produced the trained behavior. Taken together, these results convinced McConnell that specific memories are independent of neural structures and, instead, are encoded in the structure of unique variants of RNA.

And he said so out loud.

Cognitive Setting

This is not as strange as it sounds and, quite frankly, ideas such as this were “in the air” at the time.

Today, it is fairly well established that, in broad outline, the plasticity of the nervous system – the ability of nerve cells to change the strength and even the number of the synapses – is the mechanism underlying learning and long-term memory.

Short-term memory produces transient changes in the function of the synapse by strengthening or weakening preexisting connections; proteins and other molecules already present at the synapse mediate these functional changes.

Long-term memory requires structural anatomical changes. As Kandel and his colleagues have shown, repeated sensitization training causes neurons to grow new terminals, giving rise to long-term memory, whereas habituation causes neurons to retract existing terminals. This, too, requires the presence of new proteins and other molecules.

Back in the 1950s, things were much more muddled.

The spectacular success of Watson and Crick led some to ask: If genetic information is stored in nucleic acids and proteins, why not acquired information as well?

Although many neurophysiologists thought this equivalence nothing more than a bad pun, a number of molecular biologists, thinking that the time was ripe to apply their tools and analytic approach to the study of memory processes, began to seriously discuss these issues at various conferences, meetings and workshops.

So, it is important to note that McConnell was by no means alone in speculating that RNA played a pivotal role in memory storage. In fact, expectations ran high and work proceeded along a number of collateral paths.

Hyden, for example, comparing the brain chemistry of animals trained to perform a specific task to those of controls, reported both quantitative and qualitative differences in neuronal RNA.

Others, such as Agranoff, Flexnor and Barondes claimed that the administration of various inhibitors of RNA and protein synthesis either preceding or just after training had significant adverse effects on retention.

Still others, like McGaugh administered drugs to stimulate RNA and protein synthesis either preceding or just after training and claimed an enhancement effect.

Cognitive Uncertainity

Due to the inherent complexity of brain activity this work was, of course, fraught with all sorts of difficulty. It’s been estimated that thousands of electrophysiological events occur each thousandth of each second, each accompanied by an equal number of neurochemical events that release substances that are present in vanishingly small quantities. As Kandel put it, detecting and then isolating the chemical events that accompany learning and memory from among the background of ongoing chemical reactions in the brain is similar to “stopping the flow of Niagara Falls in order to count all the water molecules.” It should come as no surprise, then, the climate of opinion surrounding this work was characterized by feelings of confusion, frustration, in addition to unbridled optimism. On the one hand, scientists working in the area often commented on the depth of their ignorance. Sperry, at the conference on Learning, Remembering, and Forgetting in 1963 went so far as to comment that

not only is it quite possible that we may already have the answer to the memory trace, but, perhaps more important, we probably would not recognize the answer today if we did have it - even if it were served to us on a silver platter fully outlined, physiologically, and complete with a sheet of instructions for molecular analysis

Kimble, 1965:157.

Countless investigators referred to the “confused” and “immature” state of research on the neural substrates of memory in the early 1960s and thereafter. Sperry, at the Princeton conference in 1963, makes constant reference to the ignorance and uncertainty that envelops the area [64], and concludes that

Until we can say more precisely what kind of physiological and anatomical change is involved, there are few constraints to the speculation boom regarding possible molecular mechanisms

Sperry, 1964:170.

Miller (1964:436) reiterates this point in his closing comments:

in our present state of ignorance we can’t afford to tell anyone, ‘don’t look there!’ We must look at all levels from the flatworm to the human brain, and for various things in various places at these levels. But we do need some ideas to simplify the search so that we look where the betting odds are the best.

Schmitt (1964:645), too, comments on the highly speculative and primitive nature of the research, and Hyden (1971:51) states that the field is characterized by an anatomy of confusion. Krech and Bennett (1971) and Rose (1971) each invoke Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm-crisis. [65].

Despite the difficulties involved many believed that some major advance or breakthrough was immanent.

That McConnell’s worms and his theory that memory is encoded in unique variants of RNA would blaze the trail was, in the early 1960s, a long-shot. But that it was debated at all is important. To be sure, most working in the area were more than a bit leery when McConnell talked about the inheritance of learning or acquired characteristics – it smacked too much of Lamarckianism. And yet, as one commented,

There is no doubt that the theory is crazy; the only question is whether it is crazy enough to be true.

Another simply stated that the transfer claims were just too damn important to ignore.