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...

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...