There are a bunch of labs that are making progress in reading the full nervous system (so to speak) realtime in live worms. I like especially the outputs from Andrew Leifer lab in Princeton. I anticipate some very interesting results to come from these labs in the next decade.
I briefly considered doing a postdoc in one of these labs, because I love working worms and agree with your proposition that next logical step in neuroscience is modeling and fully understanding an entire organism. The late Sydney Brenner asked for the same in 2011 [1].
But most academic labs doing well won’t even consider a postdoc application from a student who didn’t work in the exact same field. Solidified my decision to never be part of the Ponzi scheme that is academic research.
The beauty of C. Elegans is that you actually need very little to start working with them. All the strains are available for 10 bucks a pop, you can do most work at room temperature. I only need to invest on a very custom (but not necessarily outrageously expensive) microscope to start working on this topic in my garage. Which I absolutely plan to start in the next few years. I’ve done the math and it’ll cost me less than owning a cheap boat lol. If anyone wants to fund me I’ll be open to it too :)
1. Sydney, B. & Sejnowski, T. J. Understanding the human brain. Science 334, 567 (2011).
I briefly considered doing a postdoc in one of these labs, because I love working worms and agree with your proposition that next logical step in neuroscience is modeling and fully understanding an entire organism. The late Sydney Brenner asked for the same in 2011 [1].
But most academic labs doing well won’t even consider a postdoc application from a student who didn’t work in the exact same field. Solidified my decision to never be part of the Ponzi scheme that is academic research.
The beauty of C. Elegans is that you actually need very little to start working with them. All the strains are available for 10 bucks a pop, you can do most work at room temperature. I only need to invest on a very custom (but not necessarily outrageously expensive) microscope to start working on this topic in my garage. Which I absolutely plan to start in the next few years. I’ve done the math and it’ll cost me less than owning a cheap boat lol. If anyone wants to fund me I’ll be open to it too :)
1. Sydney, B. & Sejnowski, T. J. Understanding the human brain. Science 334, 567 (2011).