Even by her own telling, Beatrice Gelber’s work was offbeat. It was October 1960, and Gelber had recently opened a facility called the Basic Health Research Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Described as an “enthusiastic psychologist” by the newspaper interviewing her about her work, Gelber explained how, several years earlier, she’d discovered an unexpected behavior in a protozoan called
Paramecium aurelia. This unicellular organism, she claimed, had shown it was capable of learning, a feat generally assumed to be restricted to what were considered higher organisms such as mammals and birds. Fellow scientists “all thought I was plain crazy when I started,” she told the