In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite

Rating:
Summary: Worms and Heroes
Review: I have been following (from afar) the C. Elegans story for about thirty years. Once I was even motivated enough to try to isolate the worm from some soil so I could play around with it for myself. The attempt failed--I don't know why--but I never lost my vicarious interest in it. This is the first book that I've read that covers the story in a "behind the scenes" way, and I was glad to see it published.

The worm now, is of course, one of the best understood multicellular organisms in all of biology. How it came to be a model organism rivaling the mouse, the fruit fly, and man is an interesting lesson in how science at its best really works. It was a man, Sydney Brenner, with a plan to pick just the right organism that could be used to attack some of the fundamental questions of genetics, development and embryogenesis. The selection of this organism took several years of hard work. It is remarkable that during this start-up of the project, the funding organization, the MRC, supported the work without complaint, even though it was something like five years before publications began to roll out.

The book is written for a general audience, though there is lots here of interest to those who are more acquainted with biology too. The politics and personalities of the effort, now almost fifty years on, are covered in quite a bit of depth and some of it is pretty entertaining. The technical aspects of the research is also explained in enough detail that the reader can follow it pretty easily, though there are a few challenging rough spots too.

This is quite a tale of heroic science getting done with a conviction that unselfish, cooperative, non-commercial, basic research is not only worthwhile, but can be a lot of fun. And these guys clearly had a lot of fun. I think that one of the main reasons, pointed out by the author, was that the researchers were crammed in together with perhaps only a meter of bench space, and often not even a desk, had a lot to do with it. No closed doors, no power point, and no email probably had a lot to do with it too.

The book could have been better organized--the jumping around in time (what decade was this?) sometimes was bothersome to me. The portraits of the scientists were nice to see, but I'd have appreciated some drawings of the worm too. Pictures of the laboratory would have been instructive, I think.

Brown has done a quite respectable job with this book, and I think it is quite worth reading if you have any interest at all in biology or the history of science. The effort described will serve to confound the deconstructionists, mystics and other quacks of the academy for a long time to come.

Rating:
Summary: Explaining Life at the Molecular Level
Review: _Caenorhabditis elegans_, happily better known as _C. elegans_ and affectionately known by the researchers who study it as "the worm," would not seem to have potential for being the focus of groundbreaking biological studies. It is only a half a millimeter long, for instance, and is a lowly nematode, living on bacteria and slime mold in temperate regions all around the world. It does, however, display rapid growth and production of subsequent generations, which made it perfect for genetic studies, and transparency, which made it perfect for microscopic analysis. But even the original researchers on the worm would have been surprised at all the work that has been done in the last forty years. _C. elegans_ is now "the most completely understood animal in history." That assessment comes in _In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite_ (Columbia University Press) by Andrew Brown. In fact, the worm looms even larger in biological research; work on its genetic map grew directly into the human genome mapping project. So its story is worth telling, and Brown, a science journalist, has told it largely through descriptions of the personalities and work of the main researchers. There is little technical detail here about the worm itself, but much interesting history about how the researchers came to understand it so well.

Chief of the characters is Sydney Brenner, who designated the worm as a fit source of research in the mid-1960s. Not everyone thought that the worm was the way to go, or even that trying to understand it at the molecular level was a promising avenue of research. There was more glamorous work and ostensibly more productive work going on researching fruit flies, for instance, but Brenner's team showed astonishing dedication. Almost everyone who worked in the lab came away happy, and Brenner and his main colleagues came away with Nobels. One of the most pleasing aspects of the research was how public it was. The researchers were in favor of free trade in ideas within the team, of course, but there was a high streak of idealism in sharing results with the outside world. They truly believed that the unfettered exercise of their talents was for the benefit of humanity. They insisted that sharing results (rather than, say, copyrighting or licensing them) meant it was more likely that someone would latch on to something interesting which needed further work. No one owned the genetic map they produced, and it was from the beginning available to all takers (although it is now much more accessible since biologists can log into it on the web). It is not just that free release is generous and right, but it works. John Sulston, one of the Nobel winners, said, "It was not a theoretical concept, it was a pragmatic way of moving forward."

The importance of the worm in all subsequent genetic research cannot be overstated, and so this is a welcome volume to recount how the worm got to be so well understood. There have been distinct effects on the research on humans themselves. Vertebrates like humans are not descended from nematodes, but we are distant cousins with an ancient common ancestor which eight hundred million years ago solved the problems of living as a multicellular organism, and every animal ever since has inherited those solutions. In a real sense, looking at the worm is a way of looking at ourselves, with all the potential for practical knowledge that this brings. But Brown's book is an inspirational story about researchers who gambled all on the detailed understanding of a humble worm not for practicality, or for riches, but for the sake of knowledge alone.

Rating:
Summary: Explaining Life at the Molecular Level
Review: _Caenorhabditis elegans_, happily better known as _C. elegans_ and affectionately known by the researchers who study it as "the worm," would not seem to have potential for being the focus of groundbreaking biological studies. It is only a half a millimeter long, for instance, and is a lowly nematode, living on bacteria and slime mold in temperate regions all around the world. It does, however, display rapid growth and production of subsequent generations, which made it perfect for genetic studies, and transparency, which made it perfect for microscopic analysis. But even the original researchers on the worm would have been surprised at all the work that has been done in the last forty years. _C. elegans_ is now "the most completely understood animal in history." That assessment comes in _In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite_ (Columbia University Press) by Andrew Brown. In fact, the worm looms even larger in biological research; work on its genetic map grew directly into the human genome mapping project. So its story is worth telling, and Brown, a science journalist, has told it largely through descriptions of the personalities and work of the main researchers. There is little technical detail here about the worm itself, but much interesting history about how the researchers came to understand it so well.

Chief of the characters is Sydney Brenner, who designated the worm as a fit source of research in the mid-1960s. Not everyone thought that the worm was the way to go, or even that trying to understand it at the molecular level was a promising avenue of research. There was more glamorous work and ostensibly more productive work going on researching fruit flies, for instance, but Brenner's team showed astonishing dedication. Almost everyone who worked in the lab came away happy, and Brenner and his main colleagues came away with Nobels. One of the most pleasing aspects of the research was how public it was. The researchers were in favor of free trade in ideas within the team, of course, but there was a high streak of idealism in sharing results with the outside world. They truly believed that the unfettered exercise of their talents was for the benefit of humanity. They insisted that sharing results (rather than, say, copyrighting or licensing them) meant it was more likely that someone would latch on to something interesting which needed further work. No one owned the genetic map they produced, and it was from the beginning available to all takers (although it is now much more accessible since biologists can log into it on the web). It is not just that free release is generous and right, but it works. John Sulston, one of the Nobel winners, said, "It was not a theoretical concept, it was a pragmatic way of moving forward."

The importance of the worm in all subsequent genetic research cannot be overstated, and so this is a welcome volume to recount how the worm got to be so well understood. There have been distinct effects on the research on humans themselves. Vertebrates like humans are not descended from nematodes, but we are distant cousins with an ancient common ancestor which eight hundred million years ago solved the problems of living as a multicellular organism, and every animal ever since has inherited those solutions. In a real sense, looking at the worm is a way of looking at ourselves, with all the potential for practical knowledge that this brings. But Brown's book is an inspirational story about researchers who gambled all on the detailed understanding of a humble worm not for practicality, or for riches, but for the sake of knowledge alone.