In 1986, John White published "The Mind of a Worm," the first complete wiring diagram of any animal's brain. 7,000+ synapses, mapped by hand.
This year, he was awarded the @WileyGlobal Prize in Biomedical Sciences.
He's donating his share to @OpenWorm.
We're organizing 2026 around:
29 Design Documents specifying how to model C. elegans, under scientific review
A contributor progression model (Observer to Maintainer)
AI-assisted contribution pathways
The science is human-led. The scaling is AI-augmented.
A major obstacle to modeling the nervous system of the worm has been the unknown weights of the connections. Which are excitatory or inhibitory and how strong? Well, the lab of @AndrewLeifer has put out a Neural Signal propagation atlas to address this critical gap (1/4)
Their preprint is online here: https://t.co/kYD3gBMAxO and you can explore the data set via an online browser here: https://t.co/WQk5RumcBX and a basic simulator based on these data here: https://t.co/IDBMoLQVRk (3/4)
Fun to interactively play on the @OpenWorm site with our best mapped nervous system yet, and to think about building a virtual organism: https://t.co/o5BwGEMch7
Omg @YeminiLab. The White Knight of neuron identification. As designated by Keynote Speaker Oliver Hobert. And well deserved moniker too. Go NeuroPAL! #Worm23
How friendly is worm community? We converged on finding w Cohen and Emmons lab. Papers came out together (below). Started Glasgow #Worm23 w stimulating discussions over haggis pizza w Netta Cohen to discuss collaborations
1) https://t.co/ROg9X9sK00
2) https://t.co/Ipdwyhp9S0
#Serotonin is a common but complex target of psychiatric drugs. A new study by the @MIT lab of Steven Flavell provides a deep but also brain-wide look at its role in producing behavior in C. elegans. https://t.co/AFSYACrsKM @ScienceMIT@mitbrainandcog#neuroscience