I'm one of the 2000 or so worm people who study the tiny nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. When we are asked by an outsider why we play with worms, our much-practiced answer goes something like this: In the
mid-1960s, Sydney Brenner chose C. elegans as a model organism for elucidating animal development and behavior because of the roundworm's cellular simplicity and advantages for genetic studies. The analysis of mutants helps us learn what the nonmutant versions of genes do. We know the location and lineage of every cell in an adult C. elegans as well as the wiring of all the worm's 302 neurons, down to the last synapse. C. elegans was the first multicellular organism to have its DNA completely sequenced (1), and many of its genes resemble those of humans and do similar jobs. The importance of such research was highlighted when Brenner, John Sulston, and Bob Horvitz were awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their worm work.