In his keynote talk at the Genetics Society of America's Genetics 2010: Model Organisms to Human Biology meeting in Boston this week, Harvard Medical School’s Gary Ruvkun spoke to the importance of basic research in model organisms — or "cardinal organisms," as he prefers to call them. "The reason I don't like 'model organisms,'" he told the audience of geneticists, is because it "sounds like model airplanes — it just sounds tiny. ...