Steve Sando was peering through a microscope at a miniscule worm squirming to escape a light when he made a surprising discovery. The type of worm he was observing, Caenorhabditis elegans, uses a muscular pump to swallow up tasty microbes from its surroundings. But when a worm was exposed to light, Sando noticed one day in early 2014, that suction reversed course—jetting liquid out of the worm’s tiny, transparent throat. As he watched the little creature make this movement, the first thought that came to mind was, “Oh my god, it must be spitting,” recalls Sando, then a doctoral student working under MIT molecular geneticist and neurobiologist Robert Horvitz. “I pulled my laptop out of the microscope and ran down the hall to show everyone in the lab.”
Before this, the model was that the smallest controllable unit of muscles is a single muscle [cell].
That was the first of ...
