The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack

For Wired, Claire L. Evans considers the C. elegans nematode, a microscopic worm made of fewer than a thousand cells. “It can reproduce, it can eat, it can forage, it can escape,” a neuroscientist tells Evans. “It’s born and it develops, and it ages and it dies—all in a millimeter.” The knowability of the worm makes it appealing for researchers, including the team at OpenWorm, a project dedicated to creating a virtual replica of the nematode. “If OpenWorm can manage this,” Evans writes, “it would be the first virtual animal—and an embodiment of all our knowledge not only about C. elegans, which is one of the most-studied animals in science, but about how brains interact with the world to produce behavior.” Evans, who showcases some exceptional explanatory work, also makes a sharp decision about the frame of her story, producing something deeply and surprisingly human.

At this point, you may be asking yourself a very reasonable question. Back at the Korean place, between bites of banchan, my friend had asked it too. The question is this: Uhh … why? Why, in the face of everything our precarious green world endures, of all the problems out there to solve, would anyone spend 13 years trying to code a microscopic worm into existence?

By way of an answer, I’ll offer one of the physicist Richard Feynman’s most famous dictums: What I cannot create, I do not understand. For much of its history, biology has been a reductionist science, driven by the principle that the best way to understand the mind-boggling complexity of living things is to dissect them into their constituent parts—organs, cells, proteins, molecules. But life isn’t a clockwork; it’s a dynamic system, and unexpected things emerge from the interactions between all those little parts. To truly understand life, you can’t just break it down. You have to be able to put it back together, too.