Nature’s Gift to Science

The title of my lecture is “Nature’s gift to Science.” It is not a lecture about one scientific journal paying respects to another, but about how the great diversity of the living world can both inspire and serve innovation in biological research. Current ideas of the uses of Model Organisms spring from the exemplars of the past and choosing the right organism for one’s research is as important as finding the right problems to work on. In all of my research these two decisions have been closely intertwined. Without doubt the fourth winner of the Nobel prize this year is Caenohabditis elegans; it deserves all of the honour but, of course, it will not be able to share the monetary award. I intend to tell you a little about the early work on the nematode to put it into an intellectual perspective. It bridges, both in time and concept, the biology we practice today and the biology that was initiated some fifty years ago with the revolutionary discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA by Watson and Crick. My colleagues who follow will tell you more about the worm and also recount their incisive research on the cell lineage and on the genetic control of all death. To begin with, I can do no better than to quote from the paper I published in 1974 (1). The paper was unhesitatingly entitled: “The genetics of Caenorhabditis elegans” and the opening sentence reads: “How genes might specify the complex structures found in higher organisms is a major unsolved problem of biology.” This is still true today. The paper outlined how a genetic approach coupled with detailed studies at the cellular level might be a way of studying this important question. It introduced C. elegans as the organism of choice for this work. This choice had a long history. Twenty years earlier, we had posed a different question. Then, the central problem in biology was how the one-dimensional sequence of nucleotides in DNA specified the one-dimensional sequence of amino acids in proteins. Today, any student would give this question a very simple answer. ‘All you have to do is to find a gene and have it sequenced and then make some protein using the gene and get someone to determine its amino acid sequence.’ In those early days, the techniques for determining amino acid sequences of proteins were primitive and needed large amounts of proteins which had to be purified first. There were no