Are Memories Transferable — or Edible?

t was the dead of winter in Boston.

波士顿正值严冬。

The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid.

查尔斯河的表面结冰了。

But Zachary Kelso braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted neuroscience labs for over half a century.

但扎卡里·凯尔索冒着刺骨的寒冷，终于解开了一个困扰神经科学实验室半个多世纪的谜团。

To do that, Kelso, a research assistant in the Harvard lab of the neuroscientist Sam Gershman , needed some worms.

为此，哈佛神经科学家萨姆·格什曼实验室的研究助理凯尔索需要一些蠕虫。

Specifically, planarians: arrow-headed flatworms, which are among the simplest creatures to possess a brain and a nervous system with bilateral symmetry like ours.

具体来说，涡虫：箭头扁形虫，它们是最简单的生物之一，拥有像我们一样的大脑和双边对称的神经系统。

Normally, labs order these widely used model organisms from biological supply companies.

通常，实验室从生物供应公司订购这些广泛使用的模型生物。

But the mail-order worms weren’t up to snuff.

但邮购蠕虫并没有达到预期的效果。

So Gershman had dispatched Kelso to the Charles’ icy banks to catch some wild ones.

因此格什曼派凯尔索去查尔斯河冰冷的河岸捕捉一些野生的。

“I thought, ‘I’m going to look crazy because I’m using a hammer to beat through the ice,’” Kelso recalled.

“我想，‘我会显得很疯狂，因为我用锤子敲打冰块，’”凯尔索回忆道。

“So I wore the more business end of business casual.”

“所以我穿了更商务的商务休闲装。”

Decades ago, scientists allegedly fed a memory to a worm.

几十年前，科学家据称给蠕虫喂食了记忆。

But today, when scientists tried to recreate the experiments, they came up empty.

但今天，当科学家们试图重现这些实验时，却一无所获。

What happened?

发生了什么？

It wouldn’t be the last time Kelso found himself in this situation.

这并不是凯尔索最后一次陷入这种境地。

The Charles River planarians, it turned out, didn’t cut it either.

事实证明，查尔斯河涡虫也没有解决这个问题。

Neither did the worms he sourced while stream-hopping around Eugene, Oregon, in March 2025.

2025 年 3 月，他在俄勒冈州尤金市附近串流时采集到的蠕虫也没有出现这种情况。

Nor did the ones he fished from Michigan lakes that June — this time in thigh-high waders — while picnicking families gawked from shore.

那年六月，他在密歇根湖里钓到的鱼也没有——这次是穿着长筒涉水裤——而在岸边野餐的家人则呆呆地看着。

Kelso diligently turned over rocks, angled with bits of meat tied to a string, and even followed maps from a vintage guidebook called The Fresh-Water Triclads of Michigan .

凯尔索勤奋地翻动岩石，用绳子绑着一些肉块，甚至按照一本名为《密歇根州淡水三甲虫》的老式指南中的地图进行操作。

But his adventure was fruitless.

但他的冒险没有结果。

Sure, he caught plenty of planarians.

当然，他抓到了很多涡虫。

But back in Gershman’s lab, none of them would do what they were supposed to do.

但回到格什曼的实验室，他们都不会做他们应该做的事情。

In the 1960s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell 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.

20 世纪 60 年代，一位名叫詹姆斯·麦康奈尔 (James McConnell) 的古怪行为心理学家说服了科学界，涡虫就像巴甫洛夫的狗一样，可以通过经典条件反射来训练，而且这种训练的记忆可以通过同类相食的方式在蠕虫之间转移。

These bizarre findings were replicated by other scientists, and worm training became a staple of high school science fairs.

这些奇怪的发现被其他科学家复制，蠕虫训练成为高中科学博览会的主要内容。

Now, 60 years later, the worms have stopped learning, and nobody knows why.

现在，60 年后，蠕虫已经停止学习，没有人知道为什么。

I n philosophy, “qualia” refers to the subjective qualities of our experience: what it’s like for Alice to see blue or for Bob to feel delighted.

在哲学中，“感受性”指的是我们体验的主观品质：爱丽丝看到蓝色或鲍勃感到高兴是什么感觉。

Qualia are “the ways things seem to us,” as the late philosopher Daniel Dennett put it.

正如已故哲学家丹尼尔·丹尼特所说，感受性是“事物在我们看来的方式”。

In these essays, our columnists follow their curiosity, and explore important but not necessarily answerable scientific questions.

在这些文章中，我们的专栏作家追随他们的好奇心，探索重要但不一定可以回答的科学问题。

I first learned about this scientific mystery while reporting another piece for this magazine about what a cell can remember .

我第一次了解到这个科学之谜是在为这本杂志报道另一篇关于细胞能记住什么的文章时。

As I dug into the historical literature on memory research, I kept coming across McConnell’s strange worm experiments, which captivated a generation of scientists before disappearing entirely.

当我深入研究记忆研究的历史文献时，我不断遇到麦康奈尔奇怪的蠕虫实验，它曾吸引了一代科学家，但后来完全消失了。

Planarian memory had itself been forgotten.

涡虫的记忆本身已经被遗忘了。

I was content to dismiss it as a fluke of history until Gershman mentioned, in passing during an interview, that in addition to their work with the unicellular ciliate Stentor coeruleus , his lab was attempting to reproduce some wacky worm experiments from the 1960s.

我很满意地认为这是历史的侥幸，直到格什曼在接受采访时顺便提到，除了他们对单细胞纤毛虫蓝线虫的研究之外，他的实验室还试图重现 20 世纪 60 年代的一些古怪的蠕虫实验。

Had I heard of them?

我听说过他们吗？

Planarian worms have remarkable regenerative capacity.

涡虫具有显着的再生能力。

A fragment that’s 1/279 of the original worm can regrow into a normal adult in weeks.

相当于原蠕虫 1/279 的碎片可以在几周内重新长成正常的成虫。

Gershman, I learned, was keen to pick up where McConnell had left off.

据我所知，格什曼渴望继续麦康奈尔留下的工作。

As part of a growing cohort of cognitive scientists looking beyond the brain for clues to the origins and basis of memory, he’s fascinated by any creature that seems to remember without the benefit of neural, synaptic networks.

作为越来越多的认知科学家中的一员，他们在大脑之外寻找记忆起源和基础的线索，他对任何似乎不需要神经、突触网络的帮助就能记忆的生物着迷。

Little Stentor coeruleus , for example, can modify its behavior based on previous experience — quite a feat for a single-celled creature that can’t possibly have a neuron.

例如，小蓝斑鱼可以根据以前的经验改变自己的行为——对于不可能有神经元的单细胞生物来说，这是一项壮举。

Planarian worms, if McConnell’s findings were to be believed, might be the next great model organism for memory research.

如果麦康奈尔的发现可信的话，涡虫可能是记忆研究的下一个伟大的模式生物。

The trouble was, it wasn’t going well.

问题是，进展并不顺利。

In fact, no matter how hard Gershman tried to train them, none of his planarians would learn a thing.

事实上，无论格什曼多么努力地训练它们，他的涡虫都学不到任何东西。

Can a worm learn?

蠕虫可以学习吗？

When McConnell posed the question in the early 1950s, the notion that memory had something to do with synaptic associations between neurons in the brain was just beginning to gain currency.

当麦康奈尔在 20 世纪 50 年代初提出这个问题时，记忆与大脑神经元之间的突触关联有关的观点刚刚开始流行。

McConnell, then a graduate student in psychology at the University of Texas, reasoned that planarians — among the simplest creatures with true neurons — should therefore be able to learn.

麦康奈尔当时是德克萨斯大学心理学研究生，他认为涡虫——拥有真正神经元的最简单的生物之一——因此应该能够学习。

His early worm experiments were not particularly novel.

他早期的蠕虫实验并不是特别新颖。

He simply substituted worms for rats in what were, at the time, standard classical conditioning studies: repeatedly shocking the worms while exposing them to a bright light.

在当时标准的经典条件反射研究中，他只是用蠕虫代替了老鼠：反复电击蠕虫，同时将它们暴露在强光下。

After a period of this training, the worms came to associate the light with the shock and scrunched their bodies in anticipation whenever the light flashed.

经过一段时间的训练后，蠕虫们开始将光与电击联系起来，每当光闪烁时，它们就会扭动身体以备不时之需。

Voilà: worm learning!

瞧：蠕虫学习！

Planarians have stranger features to offer for experiments.

涡虫有一些奇怪的特征可供实验使用。

If a planarian is chopped in half, both halves will regrow into a new worm — the tail will grow a new head, and the head will grow a new tail.

如果涡虫被砍成两半，两半都会重新长成新的蠕虫——尾巴会长出新的头部，头部也会长出新的尾巴。

A fragment as small as 1/279 of the original worm can regrow into a completely normal adult worm in a matter of weeks, a regenerative capacity so powerful that, as one early naturalist put it , planarians are effectively “immortal under the edge of the knife.” For McConnell, this ability begged the question: When you chop a worm in half, do both halves remember?

小到原始蠕虫 1/279 的碎片可以在几周内重新长成完全正常的成虫，其再生能力如此强大，正如一位早期博物学家所说，涡虫实际上“在刀刃下永生不朽”。对于麦康奈尔来说，这种能力引出了一个问题：当你把一条蠕虫切成两半时，两半都记得吗？

This is where the real worm torture began.

这才是真正的蠕虫折磨开始的地方。

In the ’60s, McConnell, by then a young professor at the University of Michigan, started beheading his trained planarians.

六十年代，当时还是密歇根大学年轻教授的麦康奈尔开始斩首他训练过的涡虫。

The worms that grew back from the severed heads behaved as the originals had, associating the light with the shock — a result he expected, given the preservation of their primitive brains.

从断头中长出来的蠕虫的行为与原来的一样，将光与电击联系起来——考虑到它们原始大脑的保存，这是他预料到的结果。

What surprised McConnell was that the worms that regenerated from headless tails remembered, too.

让麦康奈尔惊讶的是，从无头尾巴中再生出来的蠕虫也有记忆。

This meant that whatever form the worms’ memories took, they weren’t the exclusive purview of the brain.

这意味着无论线虫的记忆采取何种形式，它们都不是大脑的专属权限。

“It appeared that the memories were laid down throughout the animal’s body,” McConnell later reflected .

“看来记忆遍布动物的全身，”麦康奈尔后来回忆道。

James McConnell stands next to a printed logo of The Worm Runner’s Digest , the half-satirical scientific journal he published from his lab at the University of Michigan.

詹姆斯·麦康奈尔站在《蠕虫赛跑者文摘》的印刷标志旁边，这是他在密歇根大学实验室出版的半讽刺性科学期刊。

University of Michigan News and Information Services

密歇根大学新闻与信息服务

Thrilled, McConnell pushed his experiments further.

麦康奈尔兴奋不已，进一步推进了他的实验。

He cut the worms into smaller and smaller pieces; each time, the regenerated segments retained the memory.

他把虫子切成越来越小的块；每次，重新生成的段都会保留内存。

He stitched the heads of trained worms onto untrained tails, but they kept falling off.

他将经过训练的蠕虫的头部缝到未经训练的尾巴上，但它们不断脱落。

He pureed trained worms and injected them into naïve recipients, a delicate process that the historian Larry Stern has compared to “impal[ing] a prune with a javelin.” Finally, remembering that some planarians are cannibals, he fed trained-worm puree to their brethren.

他将经过训练的蠕虫制成泥，然后将它们注射到天真的接受者体内，历史学家拉里·斯特恩将这一微妙的过程比作“用标枪刺穿李子”。最后，他记住有些涡虫是食人者，于是他给它们的同胞喂了经过训练的蠕虫泥。

In subsequent trials, the “cannibal” worms picked up the light response right away, as though they were remembering, rather than learning, what to do.

在随后的试验中，“食人”蠕虫立即接受了光反应，就好像它们在记住而不是学习要做什么。

If McConnell’s experiments appear gruesome, his line of inquiry was of his time.

如果说麦康奈尔的实验看起来很可怕，那么他的探究路线就是他那个时代的。

The discovery of the DNA helix in the 1950s had revealed just how much information is packed into proteins and nucleic acids.

20 世纪 50 年代 DNA 螺旋的发现揭示了蛋白质和核酸中包含了多少信息。

The notion that the physical traces of memories, or “engrams,” might have some chemical basis seemed plausible enough to many scientists.

对于许多科学家来说，记忆的物理痕迹或“印迹”可能具有某种化学基础的观点似乎很有道理。

Could McConnell’s cannibal worms have eaten an engram?

麦康奈尔的食人蠕虫会吃掉印迹吗？

McConnell certainly thought so.

麦康奈尔当然这么认为。

He was convinced that their memories were encoded in the structure of their RNA — and could be transferred from worm to worm.

他确信它们的记忆被编码在 RNA 结构中，并且可以在蠕虫之间转移。

“In the jargon of computer engineering, information is always ‘fed’ into a computer,” the journalist Arthur Koestler later wrote in an appreciative survey of McConnell’s work.

“用计算机工程的行话来说，信息总是‘输入’到计算机中，”记者亚瑟·科斯特勒后来在对麦康奈尔作品的赞赏调查中写道。

“Here the metaphor became flesh.”

“在这里，隐喻变得有血有肉。”

These were sensational findings, and McConnell took every advantage of the media attention they generated.

这些都是耸人听闻的发现，麦康奈尔充分利用了它们引起的媒体关注。

Before becoming a scientist, he had had a brief career in radio, and he knew how to repackage nuanced ideas as pithy soundbites.

在成为一名科学家之前，他在广播领域有过一段短暂的职业生涯，他知道如何将微妙的想法重新包装成简洁的原声片段。

In magazines such as Time and Esquire , he spoke grandly of a future of memory consumption — of “piano lesson pills” and “professor burgers.” He brought his trained worms onto The Steve Allen Show , and, belying his clean-cut hair and horn-rimmed glasses, dubbed himself “McCannibal.”

在《时代》和《时尚先生》等杂志上，他盛赞内存消耗的未来——“钢琴课药丸”和“汉堡教授”。他把他训练有素的蠕虫带到了《史蒂夫·艾伦秀》上，并在他干净的头发和角框眼镜的掩饰下，称自己为“麦食者”。

A planarian worm swims in a drop of water, viewed through a microscope.

通过显微镜观察一只涡虫在一滴水中游泳。

Students began writing to McConnell’s lab at the University of Michigan to ask for worm-training tips for their school science fairs, and McConnell shared advice.

学生们开始写信给麦康奈尔位于密歇根大学的实验室，询问学校科学博览会的蠕虫训练技巧，麦康奈尔分享了建议。

Science, he believed, should be for the people; he saw himself as a latter-day David pitching stones at institutional Goliaths.

他认为科学应该为人民服务；他将自己视为现代的大卫，向机构歌利亚投掷石头。

This made him one of the most famous public scientists of his era, but it did not endear him to more serious peers.

这使他成为那个时代最著名的公共科学家之一，但这并没有让他受到更严肃的同行的喜爱。

It also didn’t help that he published all his research in The Worm Runner ’ s Digest , a countercultural journal he distributed from his lab.

他将所有研究成果发表在《蠕虫跑者文摘》（The Worm Runner’s Digest）上，这是他在实验室发行的反文化期刊，这也无济于事。

The Worm Runner’s Digest was “sort of Mad Magazine meets a serious scientific journal,” Gershman told me recently.

格什曼最近告诉我，《蠕虫赛跑者文摘》“有点像《疯狂杂志》和一本严肃的科学期刊。”

At its peak, it had some 2,500 subscribers around the world.

在鼎盛时期，它在全球拥有约 2,500 名订户。

The hand-drawn shield on its cover featured a two-headed planarian and the Latin motto ignotum per ignotius , which roughly translates to “the unknown explained through the even more unknown.” Its 1959 inaugural issue consisted of only 14 mimeographed pages about the care and feeding of planarians, but it quickly grew.

封面上的手绘盾牌上有一个双头涡虫和拉丁语座右铭 ignotum per ignotius，大致翻译为“通过更未知的事物来解释未知的事物”。它 1959 年的创刊号只有 14 页关于涡虫的护理和喂养的油印版，但它的数量很快就增加了。

In addition to publishing dozens of memory transfer papers and related scholarship, McConnell welcomed humor and printed science fiction stories, rousing editorials, student-drawn planarian cartoons, spoof articles, and poems.

除了发表数十篇记忆转移论文和相关奖学金外，麦康奈尔还欢迎幽默和印刷的科幻故事、激动人心的社论、学生绘制的涡虫漫画、恶搞文章和诗歌。

While the Digest is now something of a cult classic, the mix proved confusing for many readers.

虽然《文摘》现在已经成为一种狂热的经典，但它的组合却让许多读者感到困惑。

McConnell eventually cut the publication in half, not unlike a planarian worm, and renamed the serious half The Journal of Biological Psychology (no relation to the current peer-reviewed journal Biological Psychology , founded in 1973).

麦康奈尔最终将出版物切成两半，就像涡虫一样，并将严肃的一半重新命名为《生物心理学杂志》（与当前的同行评审期刊《生物心理学》，成立于 1973 年没有关系）。

But McConnell’s reputation as a heretic and prankster was well established.

但麦康奈尔作为异端分子和恶作剧者的名声早已确立。

The wheels started to come off in the mid-1960s.

20 世纪 60 年代中期，车轮开始脱落。

Although McConnell enjoyed a period of fame and funding — including an accelerated path to tenure at the University of Michigan — attempts to replicate his memory transfers yielded inconsistent results.

尽管麦康奈尔享有一段时间的名声和资金——包括加速获得密歇根大学终身教职——但复制他的记忆转移的尝试却产生了不一致的结果。

While many apparently succeeded, the failures were more visible.

虽然许多人显然取得了成功，但失败的情况却更为明显。

In 1965, the Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Melvin Calvin tried to replicate McConnell’s worm experiments and failed, even with the help of some of McConnell’s former assistants and using the same device.

1965年，诺贝尔奖获得者生物化学家梅尔文·卡尔文试图复制麦康奈尔的蠕虫实验，但失败了，尽管在麦康奈尔的一些前助手的帮助下并使用了相同的设备。

His high-profile publication of the results sparked an acrimonious debate about, among other things, proper worm handling.

他高调发表的研究结果引发了一场关于正确处理蠕虫等问题的激烈辩论。

By the 1970s, the planarian memory fad had come and gone.

到了 20 世纪 70 年代，涡虫记忆风潮来了又去。

Scientists had moved on to rats, cats, goldfish, and even praying mantises.

科学家们把目光转向老鼠、猫、金鱼，甚至螳螂。

Researchers showing successful memory transfers in rats — by injecting brain RNA from one animal to another — had published their findings in prestigious journals such as Nature and Science , making the planarian model seem unimpressive in comparison.

研究人员通过将一种动物的大脑 RNA 注射到另一种动物身上，展示了大鼠成功的记忆转移，并在《自然》和《科学》等著名期刊上发表了他们的研究结果，相比之下，涡虫模型显得不起眼。

But when further experiments proved inconclusive, interest in the question of memory transfer petered out.

但当进一步的实验证明没有结论时，人们对记忆转移问题的兴趣逐渐消失。

As the science historians Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch put it , “memory transfer was never quite disproved; it just ceased to occupy the scientific imagination.”

正如科学历史学家哈里·柯林斯和特雷弗·平奇所说，“记忆转移从未被完全反驳；它只是不再占据科学想象力。”

In addition to worm-related scholarship, The Worm Runner’s Digest , a scientific journal published by James McConnell, featured cartoons, poetry, editorials, spoof articles, and other humorous or satirical items.

除了与蠕虫相关的学术研究之外，詹姆斯·麦康奈尔出版的科学期刊《The Worm Runner’s Digest》还刊登了漫画、诗歌、社论、恶搞文章和其他幽默或讽刺文章。

Courtesy of Sam Gershman and Zachary Kelso

由萨姆·格什曼和扎卡里·凯尔索提供

McConnell closed his laboratory in 1971, and his long period of subsequent obscurity was broken only once, in 1985, when he became a victim of the Unabomber .

麦康奈尔于 1971 年关闭了他的实验室，而他随后长期的默默无闻只在 1985 年被打破，当时他成为了大学炸弹客的受害者。

(He lost his hearing temporarily after the blast.) He died in 1990.

（爆炸后他暂时失去了听力。）他于 1990 年去世。

If a younger generation of scientists is familiar with his cannibal planarians, it’s as “a cautionary tale that neuroscientists tell to their students at bedtime to scare them away from ill-fated projects,” Gershman said.

格什曼说，如果年轻一代的科学家熟悉他的食人涡虫，那么这就是“神经科学家在睡前给学生讲的一个警示故事，以吓跑他们远离命运多舛的项目”。

Still, McConnell’s unconventional work and contrarian attitude has lingered in neuroscience lore, and the idea of memory transfer remains a subject of private fascination.

尽管如此，麦康奈尔的非传统工作和逆势态度仍然在神经科学传说中挥之不去，而记忆转移的想法仍然是个人着迷的主题。

What if McConnell really did manage to feed a memory to a worm?

如果麦康奈尔真的成功地将记忆喂给了蠕虫怎么办？

For Gershman, who is searching for a way to study memory at a molecular level and connect it to observable behavior, the question was an itch that had to be scratched.

格什曼正在寻找一种在分子水平上研究记忆并将其与可观察行为联系起来的方法，对于他来说，这个问题是一个必须解决的问题。

He decided to settle the matter once and for all.

他决定一劳永逸地解决这件事。

It all seemed straightforward enough.

一切看起来都很简单。

In the spring of 2025, Gershman and Maddie Snyder , one of his postdocs, set out to reproduce the worm-training protocol of one of McConnell’s students, Alan Jacobson.

2025 年春天，格什曼和他的一位博士后麦迪·斯奈德 (Maddie Snyder) 开始复制麦康奈尔的一名学生艾伦·雅各布森 (Alan Jacobson) 的蠕虫训练方案。

Jacobson’s papers were the most rigorous of the planarian memory transfer era, and Gershman and Snyder followed them to the letter.

雅各布森的论文是涡虫记忆转移时代最严格的论文，格什曼和斯奈德紧随其后。

“We wanted a behavioral basis to be able to study the circuits that are driving memory in these extremely unstable animals,” Snyder said.

斯奈德说：“我们想要一个行为基础，以便能够研究这些极其不稳定的动物中驱动记忆的回路。”

“Are those circuits at all being used for memory consolidation or storage?

“这些电路是否用于内存整合或存储？

Because if you lose your head and all those circuits are gone, then what is the mechanism of storing memory?”

因为如果你失去了头脑，所有这些电路都消失了，那么存储记忆的机制是什么？”

Despite their best efforts, however, they couldn’t do what Jacobson, McConnell, and so many others had done back in the 1960s: condition the worms to scrunch their bodies in response to light.

然而，尽管他们尽了最大的努力，他们还是无法做到雅各布森、麦康奈尔和许多其他人在 20 世纪 60 年代所做的事情：让蠕虫在光线下蜷缩身体。

(They reported the results on biorxiv.org in April 2026.) “I was really scratching my head about this,” Gershman said.

（他们于 2026 年 4 月在 biorxiv.org 上报告了结果。）“我真的对此摸不着头脑，”格什曼说。

He’d assumed that the memory transfer would be the dodgy part of the experiment — not getting the worms to form a memory in the first place.

他认为记忆转移将是实验中狡猾的部分——首先不让蠕虫形成记忆。

They talked to other planarian labs.

他们与其他涡虫实验室进行了交谈。

They tried different stimuli.

他们尝试了不同的刺激。

They ran the planarian footage through a machine learning pipeline.

他们通过机器学习管道运行涡虫镜头。

In desperation, Kelso and Snyder even visited the Harvard Science Museum to examine a vintage “ inductorium ,” an electric-shock contraption used in midcentury worm science.

无奈之下，凯尔索和斯奈德甚至参观了哈佛科学博物馆，检查了一个老式的“感应器”，这是一种用于中世纪蠕虫科学的电击装置。

But it offered no clues.

但它没有提供任何线索。

Kelso searched for any of McConnell’s former collaborators who might still be alive, and through a stroke of luck he found contact information for Daniel Kimble and his wife, Reeva, who had both worked in McConnell’s lab.

凯尔索寻找了任何可能还活着的麦康奈尔前合作者，幸运的是，他找到了曾在麦康奈尔实验室工作过的丹尼尔·金布尔和他的妻子瑞娃的联系信息。

Now in their 90s, they live in Eugene, Oregon.

他们现在已经 90 多岁了，住在俄勒冈州尤金市。

When Kelso called them, he discovered that not only did they run many of McConnell’s experiments in the 1960s, but they’d also kept the entire print archive of The Worm Runner’s Digest in a box in their basement.

当凯尔索打电话给他们时，他发现他们不仅在 20 世纪 60 年代进行了麦康奈尔的许多实验，而且还将《蠕虫传播者文摘》的整个印刷档案保存在地下室的一个盒子里。

Kelso and Snyder bought tickets to Eugene.

凯尔索和斯奈德买了去尤金的机票。

Over the course of two days, while consuming plates of homemade cookies and countless cups of tea, they absorbed everything they could from the Kimbles.

在两天的时间里，他们一边吃着一盘盘自制的饼干和无数杯茶，一边从金布尔夫妇那里吸收了一切能吸收的东西。

On breaks from hand-scanning back issues of the Digest , they went stream-hopping nearby and filled casserole dishes with silty fresh water.

在手扫《文摘》过刊的休息时间，他们去附近的溪流中跳水，并在砂锅菜里盛满淤泥的淡水。

Back at the Kimbles’ kitchen table, the two generations of scientists watched the silt settle to see what worms might emerge.

回到金布尔斯家的厨房餐桌，两代科学家观察淤泥沉降，看看可能会出现什么蠕虫。

Planarian worms have been subjected to extensive experimentation exploring their regenerative abilities, performed by professional researchers and high school students alike.

专业研究人员和高中生对涡虫进行了广泛的实验，探索其再生能力。

Here, a worm has been induced to grow an additional head where its tail should be.

在这里，一条蠕虫被诱导在其尾巴所在的地方长出了一个额外的头部。

Taisaku Nogi, Dan Zhang, John D.

野木大作、张丹、约翰·D.

Chan, Jonathan S.

陈，乔纳森·S.

Marchant

马尚特

This, after all, is what McConnell did.

毕竟，这就是麦康奈尔所做的。

Rather than using laboratory strains of planarians, he sourced his from a lake near the University of Michigan.

他没有使用实验室的真涡虫菌株，而是从密歇根大学附近的一个湖中获取。

And so, not wanting to leave any stone unturned, Kelso made one final trip to McConnell’s former fishing grounds in Michigan.

因此，为了不遗余力，凯尔索最后一次前往麦康奈尔位于密歇根州的前渔场。

He returned with plastic tubes full of worms, but not a single one was a learner.

他带着装满蠕虫的塑料管回来，但没有一个是学习者。

“At some point, we had like 12 different strains of planaria, none of which showed any learning,” Gershman said.

“在某个时候，我们有大约 12 种不同的涡虫菌株，但没有一种表现出任何学习能力，”格什曼说。

As Snyder tells it, the Kimbles were absolutely convinced that their conditioning experiments in the 1960s had worked.

正如斯奈德所说，金布尔夫妇绝对相信他们在 20 世纪 60 年代的条件反射实验已经奏效。

The worms learned — they were sure of it.

蠕虫们学到了——他们确信这一点。

The literature of the era seems to support their certainty; at least 36 labs reported similar results.

这个时代的文学似乎支持了他们的确定性。至少 36 个实验室报告了类似的结果。

So why is it that when the exact same experiments are done today, using the same laboratory protocol and even the same worms, fished from the same Michigan waters, planarian worms are utterly uneducable?

那么为什么当今天进行完全相同的实验，使用相同的实验室方案，甚至从相同的密歇根水域捕获相同的蠕虫时，涡虫蠕虫是完全无法培育的呢？

One explanation, Snyder said, is that McConnell, the Kimbles, and all the other “worm runners” were inconsistent in how they scored the planarians’ behavior and may have misinterpreted more anodyne worm “turns” for the definitive “scrunch” of the light reaction.

斯奈德说，一种解释是，麦康奈尔、金布尔斯和所有其他“蠕虫奔跑者”对涡虫行为的评分不一致，并且可能将更多止痛蠕虫“转动”误解为光反应的决定性“挤压”。

Every scientist is a product of their time, after all, influenced in myriad, often invisible ways by sociological conditions, funding pressures, and, in this case, a highly charismatic leader.

毕竟，每一位科学家都是他们时代的产物，受到社会条件、资金压力以及（在这种情况下）极具魅力的领导者的无数、往往是无形的方式的影响。

This interpretation made Snyder hyperaware of her own potential biases.

这种解释让斯奈德高度意识到自己潜在的偏见。

“Throughout this entire project,” she told me, “I was like, ‘What are the things that I am taking for granted now in our models of neuroscience, and our assumptions of what is known and unknown, that I should really notice?’”

“在整个项目中，”她告诉我，“我当时想，‘在我们的神经科学模型中，有哪些我认为理所当然的事情，以及我们对已知和未知的假设，我应该真正注意到的？’”

A more remote possibility is that planarian worms themselves have somehow changed over the last six decades — falling victim to pollution or genetic drift.

一种更遥远的可能性是，涡虫本身在过去的六十年里发生了某种变化——成为污染或基因漂变的受害者。

Gershman finds this scenario unlikely.

格什曼认为这种情况不太可能发生。

“What are the chances that a bunch of researchers just happened to do these studies at the particular time when this phenomenon happened?” he asked, incredulous.

“一群研究人员恰好在这种现象发生的特定时间进行这些研究的可能性有多大？”他难以置信地问道。

“They just got extremely lucky, in the millions of years of planarian evolution?

“在涡虫数百万年的进化过程中，他们只是非常幸运？

And then our luck ran out?”

然后我们的运气就耗尽了？”

No matter the reason, in 2026, despite their nervous system and simple brains, planarians don’t learn.

不管出于什么原因，在 2026 年，尽管涡虫拥有神经系统和简单的大脑，但它们却无法学习。

From an evolutionary perspective, this might actually make sense.

从进化的角度来看，这实际上可能是有道理的。

“The reason that we learn associations, to some degree, is so that we can predict danger and avoid it,” Snyder said.

“在某种程度上，我们学习关联的原因是为了我们能够预测危险并避免它，”斯奈德说。

But planarians have a different relationship to danger.

但涡虫与危险有着不同的关系。

Their regenerative physiology, so key to McConnell’s experiments, protects them from blunt trauma.

它们的再生生理学对于麦康奈尔的实验至关重要，可以保护它们免受钝性创伤。

Bitten in half, they simply grow back.

被咬成两半后，它们就会重新长出来。

What use is memory to such a creature?

对于这样的生物来说，记忆有什么用呢？

“That’s a whole other philosophical conundrum,” she said.

“这完全是另一个哲学难题，”她说。

It’s a great time to be wrestling with such conundrums.

现在是解决这些难题的好时机。

Planarian learning may be a dead end, but memory transfer experiments with other organisms are back in scientific vogue — and those experiments appear to be working.

涡虫的学习可能是一条死胡同，但其他生物体的记忆转移实验又重新流行起来——而且这些实验似乎正在发挥作用。

In 2018, the neuroscientist David Glanzman of the University of California, Los Angeles performed a memory transplant on the sea slug Aplysia californica , a darling model organism for memory research owing to its relatively simple nervous system and gigantic neurons.

2018年，加州大学洛杉矶分校的神经科学家大卫·格兰兹曼对海兔进行了记忆移植，海兔因其相对简单的神经系统和巨大的神经元而成为记忆研究的宠儿模型生物。

After training the slugs to respond to a shock to their tails, Glanzman was able to transfer the sensitization from one slug to another via a direct injection of genetic material.

在训练蛞蝓对尾巴受到的冲击做出反应后，格兰兹曼能够通过直接注射遗传物质将敏感性从一只蛞蝓转移到另一只蛞蝓。

This suggested that some aspect of the memory was stored in RNA, which was McConnell’s contention.

这表明记忆的某些方面存储在 RNA 中，这也是麦康奈尔的论点。

Then, in 2021, the Princeton University geneticist Coleen Murphy found that Caenorhabditis elegans worms — microscopic roundworms with 302 neurons to their name — could learn to avoid a pathogenic bacterium by eating, or even just swimming around in , pureed worms who had learned the hard way.

然后，在 2021 年，普林斯顿大学遗传学家科琳·墨菲 (Coleen Murphy) 发现，秀丽隐杆线虫（一种名为 302 个神经元的微小蛔虫）可以通过吃，甚至只是在经过艰苦学习的泥状蠕虫中游来游去，学会避开致病细菌。

Murphy’s group identified a retrotransposon, a jumping segment of genetic material, called Cer1 , that appears to “ carry a memory ” between individuals, she said.

墨菲的研究小组发现了一种逆转录转座子，一种名为 Cer1 的遗传物质跳跃片段，她说，它似乎在个体之间“携带记忆”。

A few years later, a group at the Indian Institute of Science published a paper suggesting that trained C.

几年后，印度科学研究所的一个小组发表了一篇论文，建议训练 C.

elegans worms release extracellular vesicles — small lipid particles containing genetic information — that can impart their training to their naïve counterparts.

线虫释放细胞外囊泡——含有遗传信息的小脂质颗粒——可以将它们的训练传授给它们的幼稚同伴。

None of these researchers are half as flashy as McConnell was, but their work indicates that he may have been right about worm memory after all.

这些研究人员没有麦康奈尔那么浮华，但他们的工作表明，他关于蠕虫记忆的看法可能是正确的。

He just bet on the wrong kind of worm — and doubled down on it, despite inconsistent evidence.

他只是把赌注押在了错误的蠕虫种类上——尽管证据不一致，但他还是加倍下注。

In the end, he lost his reputation, but his sheer gusto sparked the curiosity of another unconventional scientist.

最终，他失去了声誉，但他纯粹的热情激发了另一位非传统科学家的好奇心。

Fortunately, this one’s following the evidence.

幸运的是，这个人正在追踪证据。

At Harvard, Gershman is shifting his focus from the inscrutable planarian to the more legible C.

在哈佛大学，格什曼正在将他的注意力从难以理解的涡虫转移到更清晰的涡虫上。

elegans .

线虫。

It may not regenerate when it’s cut in half, but C.

当它被切成两半时它可能不会再生，但是C.

elegans is a long-standing model organism in neuroscience — and it’s been consistently shown to learn.

线虫是神经科学领域长期存在的模式生物，并且一直被证明具有学习能力。

With new experiments underway, Gershman is cautiously optimistic.

随着新实验的进行，格什曼持谨慎乐观的态度。

“I just hope we’re not going down another rabbit hole,” he told me.

“我只是希望我们不会再掉进另一个兔子洞，”他告诉我。

A worm hole, on the other hand — that’s for certain.

另一方面，虫洞——这是肯定的。

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《Quanta》杂志对评论进行审核，以促进知情、实质性、文明的对话。

Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected.

辱骂、亵渎、自我推销、误导、语无伦次或偏离主题的评论将被拒绝。

Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (New York time) and can only accept comments written in English.

版主在正常工作时间（纽约时间）有工作人员，并且只能接受英文评论。