HISTNEUR-L: The History of Neuroscience Internet Forum

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Re: memory-transfer 

This is the message by Bill Greenough to which Larry Stern replied on 
25 February 98.  Greenough's message, sent to Stern and copied to the 
list, should have gone directly to HISTNEUR-L but the processing 
software bumped it and tagged it with a "suspicious subject" error 
message.  Nothing suspicious about the message; as for the list 
processing software, though...

For those whose are interested in the subject "memory-transfer", please 
read Greenough's message (below) and then Stern's reply, which you 
already have.

My apologies for any confusion,

Russell Johnson
HISTNEUR-L Administrator


--- Begin Forwarded Message ---

>Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 11:46:41 -0600 (CST)
>To: lstern@FS7HOST.ccccd.edu
>From: "William T. Greenough" 
>Subject: memory-transfer
>Cc: histneur-1@library.ucla.edu
>
>Hello,
>Larry Butcher at UCLA mentioned your interest in the memory transfer
>phenomenon of the 1960s.  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.  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.  We certainly knew enough
>biology in 1965 to be extremely skeptical that RNA or protein injected
>intraperitoneally into a rat could evoke specific memories in the brain.
>
>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.
>Regards,
>--bill greenough
>
>William T. Greenough
>Center for Advanced Study Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Cell and
>Structural Biology
>University of Illinois
>Beckman Institute		Phone: (217) 333-4472
>405 N. Mathews Ave.		fax: (217) 244-5180
>Urbana, IL  61801		email: wgreenou@psych.uiuc.edu
>http://soma.npa.uiuc.edu/labs/greenough/home.html
>


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<HISTNEUR-L@library.ucla.edu>