Caenorhabditis elegans is an ideal system for training to be an experimental life scientist. It is a multicellular organism with many of the major cell types including epithelial cells, muscles, neurons, germline stem cells, and gametes (sperm and oocytes). Like us, it has a complex developmental program, performs sophisticated behaviors, senses and responds to various stimuli, has elaborate metabolism, fights infections, and dies of old age. This complexity allows one to ask conceptually interesting questions relevant to many areas of human biology.

Despite its biological complexity, however, C. elegans is easy to work with. This lowers the barrier to entry—anyone can learn to work with C. elegans. In addition, with their short generation time of 3-4 days, and the hundreds of offspring C. elegans can have, experiments can be done quickly. This allows one to formulate hypotheses, experimentally test them, and use the data from these experiments to refine their hypotheses. The luxury of being able to repeat this cycle several times gives one plenty of training and experience with the scientific process. The ease of experimentation also lowers the stakes of failed experiments, which is crucial not only because they are the norm in science, but also because failure is necessary for the eventual success. Doing many experiments also increases the odds for making cool but unanticipated observations that underlie many novel discoveries. Finally, and perhaps paradoxically, ease of working with C. elegans allows one to do sophisticated experiments. For example, one can do multi-generational crosses and make double or triple mutants with relative ease, as well as manipulate gene activity in specific tissues and at precise times during development. With its short generation time, C. elegans has also emerged as a preeminent model to study the inheritance of epigenetic information through the germline. C. elegans is also optically transparent, creating opportunities for high resolution imaging in living animals. Given these conceptual as well as methodological advantages, C. elegans has been instrumental in making seminal discoveries in biology, recognized with major awards including three Nobel Prizes and three Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences.

In summary, C. elegans offers a powerful balance of the simple and the complex that serves as exceptional and rigorous training grounds to become an experimental scientist. The scientific training one obtains from working with C. elegans is universal and can be applied to many other systems one wishes to use either in their postdoc or in another scientific career.