Snail knowledge

By Ed Piper

I just read about an experiment scientists did in extracting RNA from snails and injecting it into other snails. The recipient snails behaved as if they remembered things they had never experienced, things the original snails had gone through. ("Scientists Made Snails Remember Something That Never Happened to Them," May 15)

I'm thinking of this for Gary Frank on his Viking baseball team: Younger players (which made up much of the roster this past season) could have implanted memories of successful junior and senior seasons of other players at the plate, and thereby hit with more confidence and for a higher average, bypassing the learning curve that can take one or more years.

Or how about Paul Baranowski and his LJHS basketball team: A player wouldn't have to experience success on a travel/club team in AAU play, instead could have memories and learning of older, more seasoned players and suddenly be shooting 80 percent at the line, 50 percent from the field, and beating up on schools like St. Augustine and Cathedral Catholic.

The snails, according to the news report, retracted their siphons (used for expelling waste) after receiving a tiny electrical shock for much longer if they had previous experience (the supplier snails) or if they were one of the recipient snails, with the RNA from more-experienced snails.

These sea snails, of the Aplysia californica species, measure five inches long. (That's a long snail.) The advantage in studying them is their neurons are large and "relatively easy to work with," according to the news report. David Glanzman, a professor of neurobiology at UCLA, is an author of the paper.

I just mentioned my suggestion for Gary Frank's hitters to a student in the math class I am substitute-teaching in (at a high school in a different district), and she said, "Students will want to have the RNA injected so that they can pass tests without studying." I told her I would use her comment in my blog post.