deepest dive ever

Open Archive Day

Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner, who made the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans one of the most important model systems of modern biology, died a few days ago. Reading his obituary I suddenly remembered that he wrote a humorous column on the last page of Current Biology back in the 1990s, signing off as Uncle Syd.

I wondered if his work for the journal overlapped with mine but found he signed off from his column first appearing at the back of the issues (loose ends) and then at the front (false starts) in December 2000 and I started writing journalistic pieces for the front pages in January 2001 (before that, wearing my researcher hat, I had a dispatch published in 1998).

So I did the deepest dive into the Open Archives ever and looked up Brenner's last column as well as my debut piece for the news pages, which was about European genomic initiatives after the Human Genome Project, including the projects in Estonia and Iceland:


European genomics: think big or small?

Back then my pieces were typically shorter than the features I've been writing since 2011.