In a piece for Wired magazine, Claire Evans explores the surprising inability of scientists to create a computer simulation of a creature as seemingly basic and simple as a microscopic nematode (roundworm). The goal is "nothing less than a digital twin of the real worm, accurate down to the molecule."

Evans and others are asking: "Why, in the face of everything our precarious green world endures, of all the problems out there to solve, would anyone spend 13 years trying to code a microscopic worm into existence?"

The most basic answer is that "For much of its history, biology has been driven by the principle that the best way to understand the mind-boggling complexity of living things is to dissect them into their constituent parts—organs, cells, proteins, molecules. But life isn’t a clockwork; it’s a dynamic system. To truly understand life, you can’t just break it down. You have to be able to put it back together, too."

With less than a thousand cells in its body this worm can “reproduce, it can eat, it can forage, it can escape. It’s born and it develops, and it ages and it dies—all in a millimeter…. We know the wiring; we don’t know the dynamics. You would think that’s an ideal problem for a physicist or a computer scientist or a mathematician to solve.'

For an accurate computer simulation to be created, neuroscientist Gal Haspel estimates that pulling it off may take up to 10 years, cost tens of millions of dollars, and require something in the neighborhood of 100,000 to 200,000 real-life worms.

And what, in the end, will the reverse engineers have to show for it? Haspel said, 'All these people and all these computers. And we’ll end up doing what one little animal can do right now.'”