Category Archives: Worms

The word count of the exhausted beast. Continue reading →

“In ced-3 mutants, the undead sister of the rectal epithelial cell usurps its sister’s position and performs its functions.” From the Cold Spring Harbor monograph C. Elegans II, 1222 fun-filled pages of cutting-edge helminthology. Continue reading →

There are three stages of journalistic understanding. You don’t understand the subject, but are full of infectious enthusiasm. That’s when you write the “Cure for cancer” stories You could pass an exam in the subject, and it shows. You could … Continue reading → Continue reading →

to march still: the journey to the end of the worm extends like Xenophon’s anabasis. But today I reached the place where the first maps run out, and the end should have been. Onwards. Continue reading →

count for more than people who can’t. Rupert, for example, worked out for me how much bigger are the pits in CD than the bases on a string of DNA. It turns out that, if both were the same size, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I came on this fragment of a transcript when I was working this morning. AC is Alan Coulson, at the Sanger Centre, who probably knows more about the extraction of DNA than any man alive. “John” is Sir John Sulston. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Sex is one of the things that gets left out of pop science books, at least until the subject is safely dead. There’s not going to be much copulation in the worm book, either, at least among vertebrates. Continue reading →

Shameful confession time. Here I am, a science writer of sorts, and I can never remember the difference between mitosis and meiosis. They seem to me like “left” and “right”. I know they are important labels referring to different things … Continue reading → Continue reading →

This morning, I awoke at six, from a dream in which Francis Crick was talking to me about worms. The odd thing was that I was interviewing him in bed. He wasn’t in bed: he was sitting on the next … Continue reading → Continue reading →

We travelled yesterday to the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, to look at some of the work being done by Helen Gilbart, a painter currently working in the Geological museum in Cambridge. Continue reading →