Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado: Bootstrapping flatworms into the molecular age

T he fl atworm Schmidtea mediter-ranea (a freshwater planarian) can regenerate its entire body— including complex structures such as reproductive organs and its head—from a fragment as small as 1/279 th of the animal. What grants planarians this extraordinary regenerative capacity, and why don't humans share this power? It takes a person as resilient as a pla-narian to answer these kinds of questions. Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado is just that kind of person, which is fortunate, because it was no small task to optimize the tools (1, 2) needed to develop planarians as a model organism suitable for the age of molecular biology and genetics (3–5). We called him at his new lab at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri, to talk about his life, his career, and the aspirations he holds for his favorite fl atworms. Where did you grow up? I was born in Caracas. Vene-zuela is a relatively small country in Latin America, which, although well known for its natural wonders, is not particularly well known for its pre-Columbian histo-ry—nothing like Peru or Bo-livia or Mexico. It was sort of a backwater of the colonies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. So I became very curious to learn about the rest of the world. I began to feed this interest by collecting stamps, believe it or not. I would get stamps from people who were receiving correspondence from various corners of the world, and I would go to the library to learn more about the countries they came from. That was how I discovered that not everybody speaks Spanish [laughs]. It was a great hobby, which is probably now no longer a sustainable pastime, given how email has superseded regular mail. How much English did you speak when you fi rst came to the United States? None at all! I went to college in the United States ultimately because that was where I could study molecular biology. And I wanted to study that because, during high school in Venezuela, I had a simply phenomenal biology teacher, Mr. Maldonado. For every new topic we studied, he would pose thought experiments to us. It was very engaging, and, by the time we got to molecular biology, I was hooked. After high school, I was headed to medical school because that's what biologists did back then. If you wanted to do research, you had to have …