In 2006, Hannah Seidel, a graduate student in Leonid Kruglyak's lab at Princeton University, performed an experiment that hundreds of C. elegans biologists had done before: She crossed two common worm strains, and looked at the progeny. Only this time, unlike previous experimenters, Seidel inspected the Petri plates a bit more carefully. And in the second generation, she noticed scores of dead eggs.












