Accolade for elegans

1 Program in Developmental Biology elegans, the creature finally chosen for taming, rose to the top of the short list because it also had superior They are cited for the progress they made in understanding organ development and cell death, with the assistance and collaboration of the hermaphrodite nematode C. elegans. The Vision Within the group of researchers who study C. elegans, In 1963, Sydney Brenner, one of the founders of molecu-it is seen as Our Prize, rightly awarded to the leaders lar biology, had reached an intellectual impasse. He felt who chose, developed, and exploited our organism to that there were few advances left in that field that would address major questions of biology. have the significance of the discovery of mRNA and the Reading Brenner's two short 1963 letters to Perutz elucidation of the genetic code, both of which he had and the MRC today, it is striking how clear that vision participated in, and in any case with so many Americans was from its first conception. While Brenner's ideas were joining in, the chemical details of replication and so forth still fluid in that first letter, he suggested that the repres-would all be worked out soon. Brenner thought large sor/operator theory of Jacob and Monod would be the thoughts, and the questions that were left seemed too central clue for understanding development. Indeed, the small. principle of differential regulation of gene expression is Brenner worked at the Medical Research Council Lab-so central to developmental biology that it is impossible oratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, now to see how it could have worked otherwise. And and starting a completely new research initiative re-the whole point was to do things completely and entirely. quired him to formulate ideas just well enough to con-His proposal to the MRC ended with the words: vince the LMB chairman, Max Perutz, and the leadership of the MRC, that the ideas were good ones. He began We propose to identify every cell in the worm and by deciding that the big questions were animal develop-trace lineages. We shall also investigate the con-ment and behavior, and that genetics and biochemistry stancy of development and study its genetic control. could be used to understand these processes. The question was how: molecular genetics was still firmly This concept of completeness was foreign to biology at centered in prokaryotic cells at the time, and the classi-the …