The recent award of a Nobel Prize to Sydney Brenner crowns an astonishingly distinguished scientific career. He must have come very close to winning it several times in the past. A colleague described him as 'a visionary who sees further into the future than anyone'. This is borne out by his decision--made 40 years ago--to study a one-millimetre long worm in detail to define the biochemical and...

The lengthy commentary by Gamble (1) is rife with inaccuracies, all ofwhich cannot be commented on in the context of this reply. However, because Gamble's critique largely is directed toward ecological studies, we wish to focus on a number ofwidespread misconceptions to which his critique has succumbed. We have discussed these issues at length in a recent publication in EHP (2). Contrary to his...

A review of the book: Teaching in Rural Places: Thriving Classrooms, Schools, and Communities, by Amy Price Azano, Devon Brenner, Jayne Downey, Karen Eppley Ann K. Schulte: New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. ISBN: 9780367376383. 292 pages.

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is now a major model organism in biology. The choice of Sydney Brenner to adopt this species in the mid-1960s and the success of his team in raising it to a model organism status have been told (http://www.wormbook.org/toc_wormhistory.html; Brenner, 2001; Ankeny, 2001). Here we review the pre-Brenner history of the use of free-living nematodes as models for g...