HISTNEUR-L: The History of Neuroscience Internet Forum

[Previous Posting] [Next Posting]

Re: memory-transfer 

Hello, Bill:

Thanks so much for your note. I'm sending along copies of my initial
query to the histneur list and one response to another member under
separate cover (list members don't need to see it again) to give you
some indication of what I've accomplished thus far in researching this
area.  What wasn't included in the initial posting was that, back in the
mid-1980s, first as part of my dissertation research at Columbia
University and then when on staff at Texas A&M, I conducted 50+
interviews--some in person, others via phone--with most of the major
*players* in the drama, proponents and critics alike, including Allan
Jacobson, and members of the Berkeley team: Bill Byrne, who later became
a major advocate of the transfer phenomenon, and Ed Bennett, a staunch
critic. 

William T. Greenough wrote:
> 
> (snip) I was a graduate student at UCLA at that time and
> had close contact with professor Al Jacobson, a Michigan-McConnell product,
> and the students who ran the memory transfer study that was published in
> SCIENCE in 1965. I also had contact with their failures to replicate that
> result under more stringently controlled conditions (i.e., no member of
> their research team having knowledge of the group assignment of individual
> animals at the time of testing), which, to my knowledge, were never
> published.  

Allan said as much to me in my interview; thanks for the confirmation.

William T. Greenough wrote:

> I think that scientists who do not replicate themselves are
> typically unlikely to publish and that scientists who do not replicate
> others are often reluctant to publish, simply because there are so many
> ways in which a replication might go wrong.  
 
So true!  One third (60) of the 180 labs that I have identified that
conducted transfer experiments never published, a good many of them
because they had negative results.  Most notable was the Berkeley group.
Most people are not aware of the fact that Bennett and his colleagues,
though highly critical of the rat studies--in particular Ungar's
scotophobin work--nevertheless continued in their attempts to replicate
this work--intermittently--up through 1976!  Bennett and Ungar were
exchanging experimental protocols, results and samples of (reputed)
scotophobin for some time.  

William T. Greenough wrote:

> I assume you are aware of the multiply authored letter in SCIENCE in 1966
> in which a number of groups reported their failure to replicate the
> phenomenon, and also of the letter on "persistence transfer" to an ordinary
> storage oscilloscope from a "homogenized" persistence oscilloscope.

The Science letter published in 1966 by 23 authors representing 7
labs--each reporting their failures to *replicate* (actually, *elicit
the transfer phenomenon*, they weren't exact procedural replications)
Jacobson's work--is taken by some as a pivotal event in the episode.
Textbook and review accounts often refer to it as the *knockout punch*
that killed the field. Collins and Pinch, in their brief account of the
controversy in their The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), concur. But this is clearly not the
case.  I have talked with a number of the signees of that letter and the
events surrounding its publication are quite interesting--as it
highlights the role of informal communication networks in science (among
other things).  It was certainly not their intent to kill the field or
even to dissuade others from working in the area.  Russell Leaf, who
wrote the second draft of the letter, pointed out that the final
paragraph of the letter expressly stated the collective view that
research on the transfer phenomenon not be abandoned.  Indeed, four of
the labs continued to conduct transfer experiments well after the
Science letter appeared. Twenty-five independent teams were actively
involved in transfer experiments in 1965, fifteen of them beginning
immediately after the publication of Jacobson's work.  Eighteen of these
twenty-five contined in 1966 and were joined by thirty-three more! 
Perhaps more important, NIMH awarded large sums of money on grants to
Byrne, Ungar, and Rosenblatt for transfer studies after the letter
appeared.

As for the oscilloscope letter, what do you make of Science's decision
to publish a letter such as this dripping with sarcasm?

I'd like to hear more from you, if you have the time.  If I recall, your
early work--along with the work of Rosenzweig and Krech--on *enriched
environments* also evoked some skepticism!

Warm regards, 

Larry Stern
<HISTNEUR-L@library.ucla.edu>