This last week was a sort of cascade of science awards in New York. On Monday night the New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists was announced (I think young can mean up to 40 odd). The range of fields the awardees come from is awesome- the Faculty winners were Paul Chirik (Chemical Biologist), Carmala Garzione (Earth Scientist), Ben Oppenheimer (Astrophysicist) and Shai Shaham, (Developmental Geneticist).

Shaham works on C. elegans glial development, and on Tuesday, kudos to the worm again when Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize.

My fabulous boss got me a ticket to the soiree, but my colleague essentially called me Eliza Doolittle and that’s how I felt, dressed for a mini-Oscar type thing, but unsure of all the etiquette and worried my uncoordinated phenotype cannot be suppressed. By the end of the evening it was pretty much worm-talk though, which is the great thing about scientists. You can dress up in heels or a suit, but in the end the heterochronic phenotype of a tiny nematode is where it’s really at.