How was it that you started to work on the worm C. elegans?
Thinking that evolution might provide some clues as to how Bcl-2 functioned, I thought I’d make a zoo blot, and probe it with the human bcl-2 cDNA. To get the DNA, I got tissue from mouse, Drosophila, Xenopus, herring and yeast from various labs at Stanford, and some chicken livers from Safeway in Menlo Park.I went upstairs to Stuart Kim’s lab to ask him for some worms or C. elegans DNA. Chatting with him, I lamented that I wished it were as easy to do genetics in mice as it was in the worm. I knew how Bob Horvitz at MIT had worked out that two genes, ced-3 and ced-4, were specifically required for cell death in C. elegans.14 Stuart had established techniques for making transgenic worms, so together we decided that that the best way to do genetics on mammalian cell death genes was to do it in C. elegans. He said that if I made a transgenic construct containing human bcl-2, he would inject it into his worms.For injection of the bcl-2 construct, we decided to use ced-1 mutant worms, beca
