James V. McConnell

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James V. McConnell (October 26, 1925-April 9, 1990) was an American biologist and animal psychologist. He is most known for his research on learning and memory transfer in planarians conducted in the 1950s and 1960s.

Most of McConnell's academic career was spent in the psychology department at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor from 1963 through his retirement in 1988. He was an unconventional scientist, setting up his own refereed journal, the Journal of Biological Psychology, which was published in tandem with the Worm-Runner's Digest, a planarian-themed humor magazine. His paper Memory transfer through cannibalism in planarians, published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, reported that when planarians conditioned to respond to a stimulus were ground up and fed to other planarians, the recipients learned to respond to the stimulus faster than a control group did. McConnell believed that this was evidence of a chemical basis for memory, which he identified as memory RNA. Although well publicized, his findings were not completely reproducible by other scientists and were therefore partially discredited.

McConnell was one of the targets of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. In 1985, he suffered a hearing loss when a bomb, disguised as a manuscript, was opened at his house by his research assistant Nicklaus Suino.

[edit] References

R. Thompson and J. V. McConnell (1955) Classical conditioning in planarian, Dugesia dorotocephala, J. Comp. Physiol. Psych. 48, 65-68.
J. V. McConnell, (1962) Memory transfer through cannibalism in planarium, J. Neuropsychiat. 3 suppl 1 542-548
Block, R.A, and McConnell, J. V., Classically conditioned discrimination in the Planarian, Dugesia dorotocephala., Nature, 215, Sept. 30, 1465-6, (1967).