Interviewee: Sydney Brenner. Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner talks about the reasons why C. elegans, a nematode worm, is a useful organism to study. (DNAi Location: Manipulation > Techniques > Model organisms > Interviews > Why the worm?)

What you want is to have the whole problem preserved in essence, so we need an organism that's got to have lots of different cells, it's got to be etc., etc., and if possible has got to have a nervous system. And so you are drawn immediately, you know, to a group of organisms which are called micro metazoa...and one was a little round worm that lives in the soil with a life cycle that's very fast, okay, so that you can go through a two and a half day life cycle. That means in a week you can do two generations, something like that. And we sat down, we worked out how to do genetics with these, we set out, we started to do electron microscopy, we started to reconstruct the things, and that is the way it grew. We got mutants and when people said what are you going to do with the mutants, we said we're going to study them as deeply as we can.

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