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Beyond The Scientist s coverage of COVID-19 s molecular underpinnings were many other stories highlighting the advances made in scientists understanding of the biology of cells. ....
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 ....
Single cell learning seems to be real 31 December, 2020 - 10:10 The question of whether single cells can learn led to much debate in the early 20th century. The view prevailed that they were capable of non-associative learning but not of associative learning, such as Pavlovian conditioning. Experiments indicating the contrary were considered either non-reproducible or subject to more acceptable interpretations. Recent developments suggest that the time is right to reconsider this consensus. We exhume the experiments of Beatrice Gelber on Pavlovian conditioning in the ciliate Paramecium aurelia, and suggest that criticisms of her findings can now be reinterpreted. Gelber was a remarkable scientist whose absence from the historical record testifies to the prevailing orthodoxy that single cells cannot learn. Her work, and more recent studies, suggest that such learning may be evolutionarily more widespread and fundamental to life than previously thought and we discuss the i ....