Peter Reddien: Making heads or tails of it

For his 33rd birthday last year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology geneticist Peter Reddien received a special gift from his students: a t-shirt imprinted with a picture of a six-headed flatworm. Reddien and his postdoc, Christian Petersen, had recently created the altered planarian, Schmidtea mediterranea, by using RNAi to silence a gene critical to proper regeneration and then amputating parts of the worm's body.1 Where a normal worm would have replaced posterior body parts normally, this one grew only extra heads.


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