{"id":209807,"date":"2025-03-26T14:17:06","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T19:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/the-worm-that-no-computer-scientist-can-crack"},"modified":"2025-03-26T14:17:06","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T19:17:06","slug":"the-worm-that-no-computer-scientist-can-crack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/the-worm-that-no-computer-scientist-can-crack","title":{"rendered":"The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By way of an answer, I\u2019ll offer one of the physicist Richard Feynman\u2019s most famous dictums: What I cannot create, I do not understand.<\/em> 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\u2014organs, cells, proteins, molecules. But life isn\u2019t a clockwork; it\u2019s a dynamic system, and unexpected things emerge from the interactions between all those little parts. To truly understand life, you can\u2019t just break it down. You have to be able to put it back together, too.<\/p>\n

The C. elegans<\/em> nematode is a tiny worm, barely as long as a hair is wide, with less than a thousand cells in its body. Of those, only 302 are neurons\u2014about as small as a brain can get. \u201cI remember, when my first child was born, how proud I was when they reached the age they could count to 302,\u201d said Netta Cohen, a computational neuroscientist who runs a worm lab<\/a> at the University of Leeds. But there\u2019s no shame in smallness, Cohen emphasized: C. elegans<\/em> does a lot with a little. Unlike its more unpleasant cousins, it\u2019s not a parasite, outsourcing its survival needs to bigger organisms. Instead, it\u2019s what biologists call a \u201cfree-living\u201d animal. \u201cIt can reproduce, it can eat, it can forage, it can escape,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cIt\u2019s born and it develops, and it ages and it dies\u2014all in a millimeter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Worm people like Cohen are quick to tell you that no fewer than four Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work on C. elegans<\/em>, which was the first animal to have both its genome sequenced and its neurons mapped. But there\u2019s a difference between schematics and an operating manual. \u201cWe know the wiring; we don\u2019t know the dynamics,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cYou would think that\u2019s an ideal problem for a physicist or a computer scientist or a mathematician to solve.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By way of an answer, I\u2019ll offer one of the physicist Richard Feynman\u2019s 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 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}