From Abracadabra to Zombies

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reader comments: cellular memory

28 Oct 1999 
A speculation for the cellular memory page. As you will notice from my e-mail address and my signature line, I work for the National Marrow Donor Program. As such, I'm familiar with the business of bone marrow transplantation (BMT) using unrelated donors. It's known in the BMT community that a donor's allergies can be transferred to the marrow recipient (see citation, below). Some marrow recipients also say that their food preferences have changed post-transplant, but this has not to my knowledge been reported in the medical literature. You speculate that the origin of the cellular memory belief may be the chitlin joke told in 'Brian's Song' or in L. Ron Hubbard's 'engrams.' May I suggest that a more likely origin may be the allergy transfer phenomenon I refer to?

Now, a bone marrow transplant is much different from a solid organ transplant, because in a marrow transplant one is in effect transplanting the entire immune system of one person to another, so it's not surprising that allergies are also sometimes transferred. An in any event, this phenomenon is much different from the idea that transplanted organs contain the coding of life, but since you are speculating about the possible beginnings of this wacky idea, I suggest that this phenomenon encountered in BMT may be a more likely starting point.

Reference:

Agosti JM, Sprenger JD, Lum LG, et al. Transfer of allergen-specific IgE-mediated hypersensitivity with allogeneic bone marrow transplantation. N Engl J Med, 1988; 319(25): 1623-28.

Tim Walker
Medical/Scientific Writer National Marrow Donor Program 
Minneapolis

08 Oct 1999
If you're looking for a film source for such things, you can go back much farther, to "Mad Love" aka "The Hands of Orlac", starring Peter Lorre. In it, the insane Dr. Gogol (Lorre) transplants the hands of a murderer onto pianist Stephan Orlac (Colin Clive), and convinces Orlac that the murderer's personality is taking over. Orlac finds that he has abilities he never had before -- such as knife-throwing -- related to the murderer's profession.

James Redekop