These Tiny Worms Account for at Least 4 Nobel Prizes

by · NY Times

When scientists win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, they typically thank family and colleagues, maybe their universities or whoever funded their research.

This year, as the molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun accepted the most prestigious award of his career, he spent a few minutes lauding his experimental subject: a tiny worm named Caenorhabditis elegans, which he called “badass.”

“No one ever thought to use that term for a worm,” he said during a news conference. “We are asserting ourselves now, and I was asserting this before the Nobel-stinking-Prize.”

This isn’t the worm’s first brush with international stardom, nor is it the first time C. elegans has been thanked for aiding award-winning work. Dr. Ruvkun’s award was actually the fourth Nobel Prize resulting from C. elegans research, cementing the lowly soil worm’s outsize role in scientific discovery.

The one-millimeter nematode has helped scientists understand how healthy cells are instructed to kill themselves and how the process goes awry in AIDS, strokes and degenerative diseases. (That work was the subject of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.)

Self-proclaimed “worm people” were recognized by the Nobel committee in 2006 for discovering gene silencing, which became the basis for an entirely new class of drugs. Two years later, the chemistry prize went to scientists who used nematodes to help invent cellular “lanterns” that allowed biologists to see the inner workings of a cell.

C. elegans with embryos attached to its body.
Credit...Eric Cormack

For each prize, a laureate made sure to thank the worm for its contributions, though perhaps the most famous nod came from Sydney Brenner, who won the first “worm Nobel.”

“Without doubt, the fourth winner of the Nobel Prize this year is Caenorhabditis elegans,” he said in his lecture in Stockholm.

“It deserves all of the honor, but of course it will not be able to share the monetary award.”

Dr. Brenner, often thought of as the father of C. elegans research, is the closest thing there is to a worm celebrity. He is credited with popularizing C. elegans in laboratories worldwide, after spending almost a decade hunting for the perfect research model.

Worm scientists sometimes define themselves by how removed they are from Dr. Brenner’s lab — “first generation” researchers worked with him directly, while the “second generation” worked with scientists who worked with him.

C. elegans is named after the Latin word for “elegant” because of the way it moves in graceful, sinusoidal waves. One of the animal’s virtues is its simplicity, which allows scientists to test hypotheses about fundamental biological concepts in a model that is easy to understand.

The nematodes have just 959 cells — a remarkably manageable number, compared with our trillions of cells — each of which scientists have named and charted from fertilization to death.

C. elegans moving under the microscope, showing fluorescent proteins inside of it.
CreditCredit...Luisa Cochella Lab

“This is probably the best-understood multicellular organism on the planet,” said Howard Ferris, a nematologist at the University of California, Davis.

The destiny of each cell is easy to map, since the worms become translucent under the light of a microscope and cycle through all developmental stages in about three days.

The nematode was the first animal to have its genome entirely deciphered — in 1998, years before scientists were able to do the same for flies and mice. The worm is also inexpensive, easy to store and entirely self-sufficient when it comes to reproduction; female C. elegans have functional sperm that allow them to inseminate themselves.

“It’s an experimental dream,” said Judith Kimble, a nematode researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The more we do with it, the more of a wonderful dream it becomes.”

Even when scientists come to nematology for the worms, they often stay for the tightly knit, offbeat community.

Since its inception, the field has had a tradition of collaboration. Researchers created a newsletter in 1975 called the Worm Breeder’s Gazette to share the results of their experiments before they were published.

Dr. Kimble attributes much of the research success to the fact that worm-bonded scientists tend to share their resources and cooperate, a value she wishes the rest of the country would adopt.

Dr. Ruvkun, of the Harvard Medical School, and his co-winner, Victor Ambros, a professor of molecular medicine at UMass Chan Medical School, shared their findings with each other, allowing them to piece together the mechanics of microRNA. Had they not, their prizewinning work might have been delayed years, even decades.

The C. elegans research community comes together every other year at the International Worm Convention, where the scientists traipse about in their signature garb: sweatshirts, shorts and Birkenstocks.

There are nematode-friendly comedy performances and art competitions, where scientists have entered ceramic, wool, wooden and 3-D-printed tributes to their favorite organism. At night, there are dance parties where, yes, some scientists have been known to do the worm.

This collective spirit stands in stark contrast to some other corners of biology, like fly research, where scientists tend to guard their research and compete with one another, said Cathy Savage-Dunn, who studies cell signaling in C. elegans at the City University of New York.

Indeed, there is something of a rivalry between fly researchers and worm scientists. The latter are fond of saying that flies are too complex and fly science conferences too stuffy.

But the two groups agree that their research is dismissed by mammal scientists, who reside on top of the unspoken lab animal hierarchy and often believe that experiments on invertebrates are irrelevant to humans.

In fact, the discovery of microRNA was first met with silence outside the C. elegans community, in part because other scientists thought the original findings were just a quirk of worms.

It wasn’t until years later, when Dr. Ruvkun proved that microRNA was present in a wide array of animals, including humans, that the wider research community finally acquiesced.

Even though worms are leagues simpler than the human body, we have more in common than we might believe, said Robert Waterston, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“If we understand the worm, we understand life,” he said.

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