In the beginning was the worm

The fascinating story of the quest to decode how a creature works in its entirety. A tiny transparent nematode worm only half a millimeter long has been the subject of intensive study by a select group of biologists since the early 1960s culminating in the award of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine to the main protagonists. The voyage of discovery has been arguably one of the most important quests in modern biology and has stimulated much of modern thinking about genetics, development and neurobiology.