The Mystery of the Vanished Citations: James McConnell's Forgotten 1960s Quest for Planarian Learning, a Biochemical Engram, and Celebrity

During the 1960s, at a time of skepticism about the possibility of invertebrate learning, James McConnell and other researchers attracted to the glamour created by McConnell for planarian learning established invertebrate learning with a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm and a wide variety of control groups and procedures that are still used today in work on the biochemistry of learning and memory. McConnell abandoned his dream of a Nobel prize and turned to popularizing psychology after a failed attempt to transfer memory from one organism to another through RNA as a "memory molecule." As a science writer and "pop" psychologist, McConnell was a public relations genius who oversold planarian learning and, later, behavior modification. This article solves the mystery of why the Unabomber tried unsuccessfully to kill McConnell with a letter bomb.