Read on Twitter
The scotophobin (literally “dark-fear-protein”) is one of my favorite in old scientific literature! There were a bunch of high profile papers from at least 3 labs over a 15 year period from 1962-1977 studying this phenomenon https://twitter.com/gershbrain/status/1272931440171384833
It kind of happened in two waves: the first was in 1962, where it was apparently shown that flatworms that eat others that solved a maze will actually solve the maze faster, which was chalked up to RNA. It was a shocking finding, and took science by storm almost immediately!
Others tried to replicate it for 5 years, but all fell short. The efforts were so exhaustive and so widespread, it actually became one of the early case studies for replication failure, 50 years before the current replication crisis began. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/030631278101100102
Turns out the researchers just hadn't cleaned the mazes well, and the worms were just following the trails of the ones who preceded them :(
Instead of dying out, though, the phenomenon took on a second life through scotophobin, a supposed protein isolated from the brains of trained mice, which could transfer the fear to naive mice via injection. It was "discovered" in 1966, just before the flatworm papers failed.
They even isolated and identified this supposed protein (from the brains of more than 4000 trained rats!!!), determined its chemical structure, and made a synthetic version that supposedly did the same thing. https://www.nature.com/articles/238198a0
It blew up overnight, but the numerous replication failures came faster this time: within a year. https://www.nature.com/articles/242060a0 https://www.nature.com/articles/238202a0 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0028390873900683
By 1978, the phenomenon was killed once and for all, and all mentions of scotophobin, or flatworm cannibalism-induced memory vanish from there on, only occasionally revisited as a curiosity from a bygone time. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0376635778900293?via%3Dihub
I'm still curious as to whether scotophobin was a real peptide, and if so, what we call it today and what it does. I also want to know what happened to G. Ungar at Baylor, after his signature molecule failed so spectacularly. If anyone has any answers, please let me know!
