Assistant Professor Chris Hammell studies developmental timing in the model organism C. elegans. One might wonder what this tiny roundworm has to offer those who study human neuropsychiatric disorders.

Yet, Hammell has recently entered into a productive collaboration with Professor Dick McCombie to identify some of the genes involved in schizophrenia.

We were sitting at dinner and Dick was talking about how his genomic studies have generated a long list of candidate genes that may be responsible for mental disorders like schizophrenia.

—Chris Hammell, Assistant Professor,
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Testing each candidate gene for schizophrenia to see if it affected neuronal function was a hurdle.

For McCombie, the advantages are clear:

“It was suddenly obvious—Dick and I realized we could use worms to screen these gene candidates to see if they affect neural function in the worm.”

To test each gene in mice would take years and the cost would be tremendous. We can do this in worms in about two weeks at the cost of less than $10 per gene.

—W. Richard McCombie, Professor,
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Cooperation extends not only laterally, across specialties, but vertically, among researchers just starting out and more experienced colleagues.

This is a long standing tradition at the Lab. When Carol Greider (now on the faculty at University California Santa Cruz) came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1988, she was professionally young—“little” in her own words. She came here as a Fellow, a kind of junior faculty position that bypasses the traditional postdoctoral training period.

No one knew that 21 yers later, Greider would win a Nobel Prize. And yet, “everybody at the Lab wanted to help me out. We were all equals, working toward the same goal: making discoveries that wold change the face of science.”