Stephen Downes

This is a great article showing some of the twists and turns that can happen to researchers studying memory. The bulk of the article describes the work of James McConnell, who "convinced the scientific establishment that planarian worms, like Pavlov's dogs, could be classically conditioned - and that memories of this training could be transferred from worm to worm through cannibalism." While his students swore the worms could be trained, efforts to replicate failed, and the work - and the theory - languished in obscurity. More recently, however, Princeton University geneticist Coleen Murphy found a retrotransposon, a jumping segment of genetic material, called Cer1, that appears to "carry a memory " between individuals. So maybe there was something to McConnell's work.