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No common garden-variety typeDecember, for most people, will be dominated with the thoughts of working half the month, if that; and preparations for a summer holiday resplendent with varying displays of irresponsibility and hedonism. For me, December is a time to think of worms – or more correctly, one worm in particular: Brenner’s amazing worm.
Sydney Brenner is a South African Nobel Prize winner, and I’d hazard a guess you’ve possibly never heard of him. That’s shocking, but to a certain degree understandable.
That’s because other much-lauded South African Nobel Prize winners such as Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk, Desmond Tutu and Albert Luthuli generally overshadow him. Oh yes, and let’s not forget Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee.
These are the Nobel Prize rock stars. They glow in the minds of most South Africans because in the venerable realm that is the Nobel Prize, peace and literature are kind of sexy, and Brenner’s area of expertise is not.
He’s a scientist, and like his fellow South African Nobel Prize-winning scientists Max Theiler and Alan M. Cormack, he prefers to remain out of the limelight and let his work and the vast repository of scientists he has inspired speak for him.
However, once he championed a moment that remains one of the most famous in the folklore of scientific humour. Yes, scientists can be funny; and Brenner was one of the funniest.
It was December 2002 when Sydney Brenner delivered his Nobel lecture and, in vintage Brenner form, claimed the prize should be shared not only with his two fellow winners – H. Robert Horvitz and John Sulston – but also with his worm.
This was no common or garden-variety worm, even though it was very common and is often found in the garden. It was called Caenorhabditis elegans, and the chances are you’ve just messed up the pronunciation of its name, so let’s just call it Julius.
Julius is a roundworm, about the size of a pinhead and is generally a hermaphrodite. Males do exist, but they’re very much in the minority.
But what makes Julius so special is that it is a model organism that allows scientists to study it in relation to particular phenomena that can then be extrapolated to other, larger animals; even humans and accountants.
And because accountants often demand responsible costing in research, Julius is cheap to breed and can even be frozen and then thawed, and is therefore ideal for long-term storage. Accountants love Julius.
Brenner chose Julius for research because Julius, like many politicians we know, is both simple and complex. For example, it is one of the simplest organisms to have a nervous system.
It also contains many organs that we use every day, such as a mouth and a rectum which, given the diminutive proportions of Julius, are quite close together.
Brenner was a long-time friend and colleague of Francis Crick who, together with James Watson, discovered the structure of the DNA molecule and completely revolutionised our understanding of genetics.
Stay with me, dear reader, as this becomes particularly interesting.
What Brenner and his associates did, was investigate how genes regulate organ development and programme cell death; in essence, how cells are programmed to ‘switch on’ and develop into specific organs such as a liver, and to die when their time was up.
By extrapolating what they learned through their experiments with Julius, the model organism, Brenner and his associates opened a spy hole onto the previously hidden world of the growth and form development of every animal on the planet. Important stuff, you’d agree.
But that’s not all. Inspired in part by the work of Brenner, Julius was also the very first multicellular organism to have its genome completely sequenced. In other words, its entire DNA or hereditary information is now known, gene for gene.
It may not sound like much to you and me, but for those who love to tinker with genetics, it’s like calculating the winning lottery numbers.
But wait, there’s more. On 1 February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up in the searing heat of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, killing everyone on board. Well, that’s not entirely true. There were, in fact, survivors.
Months after the disaster, a locker recovered from the crash site was opened, and in it were found, alive, hundreds of Caenorhabditis elegans! They hadn’t hitched a ride; they had been part of a series of experiments in space.
So this December, while you’re wiling away your time doing nothing at work and even more nothing on holiday, think of that little worm Julius. Hermaphroditic, small and simple, and with a mouth close to its bottom; and it seems no matter what you throw at it, it always seems to bounce back. ?
Daryl Ilbury
