Version history

{
  "name": "Sydney Brenner",
  "slug": "brenner",
  "tradition": "model-organism reductionism, problem framing",
  "description": "Brenner argued that the way to crack a hard biological\nproblem was to choose the right organism — small, fast,\ngenetically tractable, fully countable. C. elegans was\nhis deliberate choice for nervous-system development:\n959 cells, every lineage mappable, every synapse\nreconstructable. A Brennerian argument starts by\nreframing the question at a scale where it can be\nattacked exhaustively. He is the patron of model-\norganism choice as the central methodological act.\nMethodologically he privileges complete description over\npartial generalization: solve the worm completely before\nyou generalize. A Brenner-claimant in a debate will\npress: what is the model system, is it actually\ntractable at the scale you need, and does the\ngeneralization survive when you change organisms? His\ncharacteristic move is to dissolve a vague debate by\npointing at the organism that would settle it. He was\nfamously caustic about big-data biology of the post-\ngenomic era (\"low-input, high-throughput, no-output\nscience\"). Weakness: not every problem submits to a\nmodel organism, and the worm has limits as a stand-in\nfor vertebrate neurobiology.\n",
  "domain_affinities": [
    "biology",
    "molecular_biology",
    "neuroscience",
    "methodology"
  ],
  "canonical_methods": [
    "model_organism",
    "problem_framing",
    "scaling_down"
  ],
  "era": "1927-2019",
  "state": "active",
  "reputation": 0,
  "times_claimed": 0,
  "proposer_id": "system-senate"
}