In the Beginning Was the Worm

"This is a story where the science starts with toothpicks, and ends with supercomputers: yet at the end of it, we still don't properly understand the most studied animal on Earth. Ever since Descartes, scientists have believed that animals are really complicated machines. The worm, so simple that it has no brain and every cell in its body can be counted and traced, is as basic as an animal can be. Uncountable trillions of them have been sliced, poisoned, centrifuged and frozen in fulfillment of the dream of understanding them as if they were made from tiny Meccano sets. The transparent worm has become a lens through which the whole of biology can be studied. Yet complete understanding constantly recedes. 'When we understand the worm, we will understand life, ' says John Sulston. Along with Horvitz he discovered the phenomenon of programmed cell death in the worm, which is essential to the way all animals grow; and Horvitz later showed that the genes which led to cell death in the worm did the same in humans." "In the Beginning Was the Worm is not just an account of the study of one small organism. It also explains why scientists believe that genes will make sense of all their understandings of biology, and how much work will be needed before that dream comes true."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.