Chloe Kwan

By the time I had to write down what I saw, I sat at a blank page.

The jar was gone, the experiment I didn't see, and the lesson I didn't even understand.

And yet, year six's disinterest in in-class science experiments always seems unwarranted and strange.

Well, this lesson was learnt in kindergarten and time and time again through primary school.

You cannot get children interested in something that doesn't even work.

Here on the screen we see the infective stage, the larval stage of the rat nematode Nipostrongylus brasiliensis, which is our model organism in our lab for the human hookworm.

Yes, the rat nematode.

It's not precisely the same as the human hookworm, but it's similar enough in its life cycle and the way that it infects animals and the proteins and various anti-inflammatories that it releases that we can use it as a model for the human hookworm.

Yeah, this is zoomed in, but there's probably a few thousand, tens of thousands of little worms wriggling around in this petri dish.

Because I'm continuously working on them and other people in our lab are also constantly using them.

And to keep the worm life cycle going, we must passage them every four weeks or less.

So I've always got a live supply of worms in the labs.

A wild-type worm or a genetically modified worm, they'll be beneficial in some way, I think.