James McConnell’s memory transfer experiment is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of science. We don’t pay enough attention to wrong ideas. While we tend to dismiss wrong ideas in science as obviously silly from our current knowledge, we forget that our current knowledge depends on the testing of those hypotheses.
If McConnell’s ideas about RNA as the chemical memory trace, he would have won the Nobel Prize. He deserves our respect even though his conjecture turned out to be wrong.
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