[
Science,
1997]
When I began working on the small nematode Caenorhabditis elegans in the early '70s, not long after Sydney Brenner had chosen it as a model organism for studying animal development and behavior, one could read most of the essentials then published about the creature in an afternoon. As more people joined the worm community and wrote papers that demanded attention, newcomers and interested spectators faced an ever bigger job trying to familiarize themselves with the field. In 1988, a book, The Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, came to the rescue. "Worm I" reviewed the worm's genome, anatomy, embryology, sex determination, muscle development, and behavior, among other things. Appendixes contained a list of all 959 somatic hermaphrodite cells and their lineages, a list of 774 mapped genes and mutant phenotypes, and a compilation of laboratory methods. "Worm I" has aged gracefully but is irrevocably stuck at 1988. Enter "Worm II".