Alison Woollard on what she has learnt from mutant worms

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

C. elegans is a rather special worm, so-named for the elegant way it moves in sinusoidal curves. It's studied, and much loved, by thousands of scientists around the world. Alison Woollard joined this exclusive club of worm scientists when she moved to the world famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, also known as 'worm Mecca' in 1995. She started her career working as a lab technician, having dropped out of university. After later graduating from Birkbeck, she worked on yeast. But once she found the worm there was no turning back. She describes the hours she spent staring down the microscope at these tiny creatures, unprepossessing to the uninitiated, but an absolute joy to her. These hours led her to the discovery of two genes responsible for different defects in the tails of the male worms, called male abnormality 2 and male abnormality 9. (There are no female worms by the way, only males and hermaphrodites). It's not easy finding a gene or genes when you don't even know what it is that you're looking for, only the effect it has on the tails of mutant worms, each no more than a mm long. And it took Alison a year of repetitive trial and error to see which normal gene corrected the fault in the next generation. "Most days are failures", she says. Finding her first gene was a euphoric moment. She celebrated by buying everyone a cup of tea. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:02.0	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.
0:06.0	First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
0:09.0	I'm Jimal Kiele and my mission is to interview the most fascinating and important scientists alive today
0:15.7	and to find out what makes them tick.
0:18.9	My guest today has pursued what many might consider a rather niche interest, the genetics of a tiny nematode worm,
0:26.5	known to those in the know as sea elegance. It's an un-pre-possessing organism just a millimeter long and yet thousands of biologists
0:34.8	around the world have dedicated their lives to studying it. There's even a scholarly
0:39.1	journal called Worm devoted to this model organism.
0:43.0	Allison Woolard joined this exclusive club when she moved to the world famous laboratory
0:47.3	of molecular biology in Cambridge, a place she likes to call worm mecca. Her first research project was on yeast, but once she
0:56.1	discovered C. Elegans, there was no turning back. Allison Willard, welcome to the Life Scientific.
1:00.5	Thank you very much. So how long have you and the worm been together now? It must be what 20 years?
1:06.3	Yeah, we've been together since 1995. That's very sweet. How many days do you reckon you've accumulated staring down a microscope at the world?
1:14.4	Oh, quite a few.
1:17.4	So in the early days, of course it would be all day, every day.
1:20.1	Of course now it's a lot less.
1:22.1	But for those first sort of four or five years it was it was a it was a constant
1:26.7	presence in my life the worm down the microscope all the time. That's dedication.
1:32.3	Well everyone who works on worms I think would say it was a labour of love rather than dedication.
1:38.0	People only do things like that because they want to.
1:41.0	You can't force someone to stare down a microscope for eight hours a day
	...

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