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MIXED RESULTS. "These remarkable discoveries have not had sufficient impact on the field and were largely abandoned because of practical difficulties inherent in manual experiments. While the basic findings were validated in some cases, they failed to be reproduced in others, and the whole line of research became abandoned." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

BIAS. "McConnell's results are now attributed to observer bias. No blinded experiment has ever reproduced his results of 'maze-running'. Subsequent explanations of maze-running enhancements associated with cannibalism of trained planarian worms were that the untrained flatworms were only following tracks left on the dirty glassware rather than absorbing the memory of their fodder." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian View in LinkedIn

THEORY CATCHES UP. "While modern discoveries such as epigenetic modification and RNAi now offer mechanistic explanations of some of the original results, the primary barrier to molecular-level investigations into the dynamics of memory during CNS regeneration has remained: the difficulty of developing a robust learning assay in planarians." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

SAMPLING SIZES. "Manual behavior experiments involve limited sample sizes, difficulties in precise reproduction of protocols, and lack of quantitative analysis. As a result of these difficulties, even the capacity for long-term memory planarians has been questioned." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

METHODOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS. "These remarkable discoveries have not had sufficient impact on the field and were largely abandoned because of practical difficulties inherent in manual experiments. While the basic findings were validated in some cases, they failed to be reproduced in others, and the whole line of research became abandoned." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

RAT NEWS. "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." https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn

VINDICATION. "Everything changed when, in late 1965, four independent labs reported successful memory-transfer experiments using rats (and in one case, cross-species transfer between rats and mice). Two of these reports appeared in the high-impact journals Science and Nature." https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn

AFFIRMATION. "Our results, obtained using a highly sensitive, objective, quantitative analysis system, support previous findings of Best and Rubenstein that planarians are capable of acquiring a relatively complex, explicit-like memories of environmental familiarity." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

DIFFERENCES OF OPINION. "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.” https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn

REVIVAL OF OLD FINDINGS. "Our data reveal the presence of memory savings in regenerated tail fragments from trained worms. We suggest that some trace of memory is stored in locations distributed beyond the brain (because the place conditioning association survives decapitation)." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn