Word: flatworms
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From Tail to Head. When a flatworm is cut into two or more pieces, each piece grows into a whole new flatworm. Dr. McConnell and colleagues found that the cut-off part of an educated flatworm passes on much of its learning to the whole worm into which it grows. More surprising, the tails showed as much memory retention as the heads-often more...
...research subjects ranged from cannibalistic flatworms to elderly patients in a Canadian psychiatric hospital. But both the psychiatrists and the flatworm fanciers were working with the same basic stuff: ribonucleic acid (RNA), which seems to be the chemical paper that carries the imprint of animal and human memories. Learned reports on the widely varied projects last week contained startling but strangely similar suggestions for the future. Some day, said the worm workers, students may be able to take their lessons in tablet form. Some day, said the psychiatrists, an old man's failing memory may be rejuvenated in much...
This suggested a chemical change, and Dr. McConnell reasoned that it ought to be possible to educate preschool flatworms by feeding them the proper memory chemicals. He and Assistant Barbara Humphries chopped up some well-trained worms and fed the pieces by hand to unschooled animals. The cannibals learned by eating: when they went to light-and-shock school, they proved to be flatworm prodigies; they learned twice as fast as cannibal worms fed on uneducated meat...
...Like a Flatworm. Calculating machines have been getting better and more complicated, Professor McCulloch told the engineers, but they have a long way to go before they rival the brain. A big calculator with 10,000 vacuum tubes may be a useful machine, but it has no more "intelligence" than a primitive flatworm with about that number of nerve cells. Lecturer McCulloch frankly admits that he cannot explain, in terms of electrical engineering, the brain's creative powers...
Highlights of last week's convention of the National Academy of Sciences at Brown University (Providence, R. I.): Totipotency. When a flatworm (Planaria maculata, which inhabits fresh water) is cut into pieces, each piece will grow into a healthy and flawless new flatworm. Just how this marvelously convenient process of regeneration in lower animals works, no one knows. One theory is that their bodies contain undifferentiated, "totipotent" cells capable of growing into any organ under some unexplained architectural guidance. Professor James Walter Wilson of Brown University hazarded the guess that higher animals, perhaps even man, may harbor these cells...