How a worm helped explain human development
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in the 1950s, South African biologist Sydney Brenner was searching for a model animal to help him tease out the genes involved in human behaviour and human development from egg to adult. Brenner chose a tiny nematode worm called caenorhabditis elegans (c.elegans for short), whose biological clockwork can be observed in real time under a microscope through its transparent skin. The worm has since been at the heart of all sorts of discoveries about how our bodies work and fail. Sue Armstrong has been speaking to people who knew and worked with Sydney Brenner.
This programme is a Ruth Evans Production.
Photo: the c. elegans worm. Credit: Science Photo Library
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC Sounds |
| 0:30.9 | You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:38.0 | I'm Sue Armstrong and today we're following the story of a microscopic worm called |
| 0:43.6 | Sinohabditis elegance or sea elegance for short. |
| 0:47.6 | It lives in the space between grains of earth |
| 0:50.4 | and has found itself at the heart of a myriad scientific discoveries. |
| 0:55.8 | We go back to the 1960s and the quest by South African biologist Sydney Brenner for a new model animal that could help him explore the mysteries of human development and behavior. |
| 1:07.0 | I needed an organism with which I could do proper genetics and since you had to see where one cell ended and my mother |
| 1:16.1 | began that had to be with the electron microscope and so I needed a small organism that I could fit into the window of the electron microscape. |
| 1:27.0 | I decided to hunt for such an organism and finally lighted on these little nematode worms, |
| 1:38.0 | C. L. agains, and I started working. |
| 1:42.0 | Sydney Brenners got in the worm community having chosen this model organism. |
| 1:48.0 | And what he really did was to make a very wise choice about a system to study really complex biology but a simple system and that was the real genius. |
| 1:58.0 | This is basic biology for sure, but it's amazing how that basic biology has now been translated into humans and into an |
| 2:05.9 | understanding of disease. |
... |
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