In the Beginning was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite (2003) 1/12/05. Reviewed by Jon Turney Andrew Brown presents the tiny organism that proved the key to genomic technologies.

Among all the variety of life, just a few organisms have been singled out by geneticists to help them build their science. Mendel's sweet peas and T H Morgan's fruit flies started it off. More recently, the simple bacterium E coli, the viruses that attack it, and the mouse have been the unsung heroes of innumerable scientific papers. And then there was the worm.

Not the earthworm most of us think of, but a tiny, transparent, nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans. In one of the most fruitful strategic decisions ever taken in research, Sydney Brenner proposed a study of the worm in the early 1960s. Brenner's first request for funding for studies of the nematode to the British Medical Research Council took up just a side of A4, and was couched in the most general possible terms.

Forty years later, conferences on C. elegans draw thousands of researchers and it is, as Andrew Brown says, "the most completely understood animal in history". And as well as yielding huge dividends in study of gene regulation, development, ageing and a host of other key biological problems, it was also the proving ground for the technologies that made the human genome project possible. Brown's engaging book explains how.

His two themes are the extraordinary detail of our current understanding of the creature, and the prodigious, often obsessive labour of the worm researchers. The advantages of the worm were that it has just 959 cells, its simple neuronal network is always identically wired in genetically identical specimens, and it is hermaphroditic, able to mate with itself, which makes the genetics easier to handle. Its translucency also makes its development easy to follow. Easy, that is, if you are prepared to spend decades looking down a microscope at a creature half a millimetre long.

Brown, who seems to have acquired the obsession with the worm himself along the way, writes warmly of the people who led the work, Brenner himself, and John (now Sir John) Sulston in Cambridge and their US colleague Bob Horwitz, the man who, as Sulston put it, "spent 30 years studying 22 cells in the worm's vulva". Although the trio shared a Nobel Prize in 2002, Brown emphasises that their main motivation was simply to advance fundamental understanding of biology. For Brown, "the worm project is a remarkable story of altruism, cooperation and general niceness".

And advance it they did. Biologists now have not only a complete gene map and sequence of the worm, but also a neuronal map, and a developmental lineage for every one of its cells. There are mutants that shed light on the function of around a third of its genes, many of which it shares with other organisms, including humans. And the work continues apace. The beast may be well understood, but there is still much to follow through in detail. As Brown says, "this tiny scrap of voracity is much more complicated than it seems".

His book is a nice testament to the intricacies of even a simple organism, and to the tenacity of the scientists and their equally dedicated technicians who made them visible.

Book details

Hardcover 256 pages (February 2003)
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
Language: English
ISBN: 0743207165